FROn  THE  BOOKS  OF 

FREEMAN-HUNTED 


1 


Jerome  K.  Jerome  s  Books. 

IDLE  THOUGHTS  OF  AN  IDLE 
FELLOW. 

BY 

JEROME  K.  JEROME. 

i2mo.    Cloth,  $1.00. 
"  The  Idle  Thoughts,"  by  Jerome,  with  his 

Special  private  views, 
Is  a  book  all  busy  people  should 

Undoubtedly  peruse. — London  Punch. 
Full  of  quaint   humor,  caustic  reflections,  and  deep 
and  genuine  pathos. — London  Literary  World. 

THREE    MEN    IN    A    BOAT 

(TO  SAY  NOTHING  OF  THE  DOG). 
Illustrations  by  A.  FREDERICS.     i2mo.     Cloth,  $1.25. 
A  tour  de  force  in  fun. — Saturday  Review. 
Irresistibly  funny. —  Vanity  Fair. 


STAGE -LAND: 

HABITS  AND  CUSTOM* 

INHABITANTS. 
Illustrated  by  J.  BERNARD  PARTRIDGE.    12010.    $ 


CURIOUS  HABITS  AND  CUSTOMS  OF  ITS 
INHABITANTS. 


122*7 
STAGE-LAND 

CURIOUS   HABITS  AND  CUSTOMS 

OF  ITS 

INHABITANTS 


DESCRIBED  BY 


[JJLROME    K.   JEROME 

AUTHOR   OF    "IDLE   THOUGHTS   OF   AN   IDLE    FELLOW,"    "THREE 
MEN   IN  A   BOAT,"   ETC. 


ILLUSTRATED  BY 

J.    BERNARD   PARTRIDGE 


NEW  YORK 

HENRY  HOLT  AND  COMPANY 
1890 


TO 

THAT  HIGHLY  RESPECTABLE 
BUT  UNNECESSARILY  RETIRING  INDIVIDUAL 

OF  WHOM 
WE  HEAR  SO  MUCH  BUT  SEE  SO  LITTLE 


"THE  EARNEST  STUDENT  OF  THE  DRAMA,' 

THIS 

(COMPARATIVELY)  TRUTHFUL  LITTLE 

BOOK  IS  LOVINGLY 

DEDICATED, 


LIST  OF  CITIZENS  INTERVIEWED. 


HERO, -  7 

VILLAIN, 21 

HEROINE,                                   35 

COMIC  MAN,  47 

LAWYER,  59 

ADVENTURESS, 71 

SERVANT  GIRL, 85 

CHILD,  97 

COMIC  LOVERS,                 -        -        -        -        -        -        -  in 

PEASANTS,     ....                ....  123 

GOOD  OLD  MAN,      -                        ......  133 

IRISHMAN,    •                                139 

DETECTIVE,       ........        .  147 

SAILOR,        -•*,,.,-,  153 


§ 

irl_ 


1  he  Otage  flero.  • 


STAGE-LAND. 


IS 


1ber<x 


NAME    is    George,    gener- 
ally   speaking:     "Call     me 
George  !"    he  says  to  the  heroine. 
^      She  calls  him  George  (in  a  very 
low  voice,  because  she  is  so  young 
and  timid).     Then  he  is  happy. 

The  Stage  hero  never  has  any 
work  to  do.  He  is  always  hanging 
about,  and  getting  into  trouble.  His  chief  aim 
in  life  is  to  be  accused  of  crimes  he  has  never 
committed,  and  if  he  can  muddle  things  up  with 
a  corpse,  in  some  complicated  way,  so  as  to  get 
himself  reasonably  mistaken  for  the  murderer, 
he  feels  his  day  has  not  been  wasted. 

He  has  a  wonderful  gift  of  speech,  and  a  flow  of 
language,  calculated  to  strike  terror  to  the  brav- 

7 


8 


STAGE-LAND. 


est  heart.  It  is  a  grand  thing  to  hear  him  bully- 
ragging the  villain. 

The  Stage  hero  is  always  entitled  to  "estates," 
chiefly  remarkable  for  their  high  state  of  cultiva- 
tion and  for  the  eccentric  ground  plan  of  the 
"Manor  House"  upon  them. 

The  house  is  never  more  than  one  story  high, 


BULLYRAGGING  THE   VILLAIN. 


but  it  makes  up  in  green  stuff  over  the  porch  what 
it  lacks  in  size  and  convenience. 

The  chief  drawback  in  connection  with  it,  to 
our  eyes,  is  that  all  the  inhabitants  of  the  neigh- 


THE  HERO.  9 

boring  village  appear  to  live  in  the  front  garden, 
but  the  hero  evidently  thinks  it  rather  nice  of 
them,  as  it  enables  him  to  make  speeches  to  them 
from  the  front  door  step — his  favorite  recreation. 

There  is  generally  a  public  house  immediately 
opposite.  This  is  handy.  These  "estates"  are  a 
great  anxiety  to  the  Stage  hero.  He  is  not  what 
you  would  call  a  business  man,  as  far  as  we  can 
judge,  and  his  attempts  to  manage  his  own  prop- 
erty invariably  land  him  in  ruin  and  distraction. 
His  "estates,"  however,  always  get  taken  away 
from  him  by  the  villain,  before  the  first  act  is  over, 
and  this  saves  him  all  further  trouble  with  regard 
to  them,  until  the  end  of  the  play,  when  he  gets 
saddled  with  them  once  more. 

Not  but  what  it  must  be  confessed  that  there  is 
much  excuse  for  the  poor  fellow's  general  bewil- 
derment concerning  his  affairs ;  and  for  his  legal 
errors  and  confusion,  generally.  Stage  "law"  may 
not  be  quite  the  most  fearful  and  wonderful  mys- 
tery in  the  whole  universe,  but  it's  near  it — very 
near  it.  We  were  under  the  impression,  at  one 
time,  that  we  ourselves,  knew  something — just  a 
little — about  statutory  and  common  law,  but,  after 
paying  attention  to  the  legal  points  of  one  or  two 
plays,  we  found  that  we  were  mere  children  at  it. 


10  STAGE-LAND. 

We  thought  we  would  not  be  beaten,  and  we 
determined  to  get  to  the  bottom  of  Stage  law, 
and  to  understand  it ;  but,  after  some  six  months' 
effort,  our  brain  (a  singularly  fine  one)  began  to 
soften ;  and  we  abandoned  the  study,  believing 
it  would  come  cheaper,  in  the  end,  to  offer  a 
suitable  reward,  of  about  fifty  or  sixty  thousand 
pounds  say,  to  any  one  who  would  explain  it 
to  us. 

The  reward  has  remained  unclaimed  to  the  pres- 
ent day,  and  is  still  open. 

One  gentleman  did  come  to  our  assistance,  a 
little  while  ago,  but  his  explanations  only  made 
the  matter  more  confusing  to  our  mind  than  it 
was  before.  He  was  surprised  at,  what  he  called, 
our  density,  and  said  the  thing  was  all  clear  and 
simple  to  him.  But  we  discovered  afterwards 
that  he  was  an  escaped  lunatic. 

The  only  points  of  Stage  "law"  on  which  we  are 
at  all  clear,  are  as  follows : — 

That  if  a  man  dies,  without  leaving  a  will,  then 
all  his  property  goes  to  the  nearest  villain. 

But  that  if  a  man  dies,  and  leaves  a  will,  then 
all  his  property  goes  to  whoever  can  get  posses- 
sion of  that  will. 

That  the  accidental  loss  of  the  three  and  six- 


THE  HERO.  II 

penny  copy  of  a  marriage  certificate  annuls  the 
marriage. 

That  the  evidence  of  one  prejudiced  witness,  of 
shady  antecedents,  is  quite  sufficient  to  convict 
the  most  stainless  and  irreproachable  gentleman 
of  crimes  for  the  committal  of  which  he  could 
have  had  no  possible  motive. 

But  that  this  evidence  may  be  rebutted,  years 
afterwards,  and  the  conviction  quashed  without 
further  trial,  by  the  unsupported  statement  of  the 
comic  man. 

That  if  A.  forges  B.'s  name  to  a  check  then 
the  law  of  the  land  is  that  B.  shall  be  sentenced 
to  ten  years'  penal  servitude. 

That  ten  minutes'  notice  is  all  that  is  required 
to  foreclose  a  mortgage. 

That  all  trials  of  criminal  cases  take  place  in  the 
front  parlor  of  the  victim's  house,  the  villain  act- 
ing as  counsel,  judge  and  jury  rolled  into  one,  and 
a  couple  of  policemen  being  told  off  to  follow  his 
instructions. 

These  are  a  few  of  the  more  salient  features  of 
Stage  "law"  so  far  as  we  have  been  able  to  grasp 
it  up  to  the  present ;  but,  as  fresh  acts  and 
clauses  and  modifications  appear  to  be  introduced 
for  each  new  play,  we  have  abandoned  all  hope 


12  STAGE-LAND. 

of  ever  being  able  to  really  comprehend  the 
subject. 

To  return  to  our  hero,  the  state  of  the  law,  as 
above  sketched,  naturally  confuses  him,  and  the 
villain,  who  is  the  only  human  being  who  does 
seem  to  understand  Stage  legal  questions,  is  easily 
able  to  fleece  and  ruin  him.  The  simple-minded 
hero  signs  mortgages  and  bills  of  sale,  and  deeds 
of  gift  and  such  like  things,  under  the  impression 
that  he  is  playing  some  sort  of  a  round  game ;  and 
then,  when  he  cannot  pay  the  interest,  they  take 
his  wife  and  children  away  from  him,  and  turn  him 
adrift  into  the  world. 

Being  thrown  upon  his  own  resources,  he  natu- 
rally starves. 

He  can  make  long  speeches,  he  can  tell  you  all 
his  troubles,  he  can  stand  in  the  limelight  and 
strike  attitudes,  he  can  knock  the  villain  down, 
and  he  can  defy  the  police,  but  these  requirements 
are  not  much  in  demand  in  the  labor  market,  and, 
as  they  are  all  he  can  do  or  cares  to  do,  he  finds 
earning  his  living  a  much  more  difficult  affair 
than  he  fancied. 

There  is  a  deal  too  much  hard  work  about  it  for 
him.  He  soon  gives  up  trying  it  at  all,  and  pre- 
fers to  eke  out  an  uncertain  existence  by  spong- 


THE  HERO.  13 

ing  upon  good-natured  old  Irish  women,  and 
generous  but  weak-minded  young  artisans  who 
have  left  their  native  village  to  follow  him,  and 
enjoy  the  advantage  of  his  company  and  conver- 
sation. 

And  so  he  drags  out  his  life,  during  the  middle 


SPONGING   UPON   GOOD-NATURED    OLD 
IRISH    WOMEN. 


of  the  piece,  raving  at  Fortune,  raging  at  Hu- 
manity and  whining  about  his  miseries  until  the 
last  act. 

Then  he  gets  back  those  "estates"  of  his  into 
his  possession  once  again,  and  can  go  back  to  the 


14  STAGE-LAND. 

village,  and  make  more  moral  speeches,  and  be 
happy. 

Moral  speeches  are,  undoubtedly,  his  leading 
article,  and  of  these,  it  must  be  ovvned,  he  has  an 
inexhaustible  stock.  He  is  as  chock  full  of  noble 
sentiments  as  a  bladder  is  of  wind.  They  are 
weak  and  watery  sentiments  of  the  sixpenny  tea- 
meeting  order.  We  have  a  dim  notion  that  we 
have  heard  them  before.  The  sound  of  them 
always  conjures  up  to  our  mind  the  vision  of  a 
dull  long  room,  full  of  oppressive  silence,  broken 
only  by  the  scratching  of  steel  pens,  and  an  occa- 
sional whispered :  "Give  us  a  suck,  Bill.  You 
know  I  always  liked  you";  or  a  louder:  "Please, 
sir,  speak  to  Jimmy  Boggles.  He's  a  jogging  my 
elbow." 

The  Stage  hero,  however,  evidently  regards 
these  meanderings  as  gems  of  brilliant  thought, 
fresh  from  the  philosophic. 

The  gallery  greet  them  with  enthusiastic  ap- 
proval. They  are  a  warm-hearted  people,  gallery- 
ites,  and  they  like  to  give  a  hearty  welcome  to  old 
friends. 

And  then,  too,  the  sentiments  are  so  good,  and 
a  British  gallery  is  so  moral.  We  doubt  if  there 
could  be  discovered  on  this  earth  any  body  of  hu- 


THE  HERO.  IS 

man  beings  one  half  so  moral — so  fond  of  good- 
ness even  when  it  is  slow  and  stupid — so  hateful 
of  meanness  in  word  or  deed — as  a  modern  theatri- 
cal gallery. 

The  early  Christian  martyrs  were  sinful  and 
worldly,  compared  with  an  Adelphi  Gallery. 

The  Stage  hero  is  a  very  powerful  man.     You 


THE  STAGE   HERO   IS  A  VERY   POWERFUL   MAN. 

wouldn't  think  it,  to  Ipok  at  him,  but  you  wait  till 
the  heroine  cries :  "Help !  Oh,  George,  save  me !" 
or  the  police  attempt  to  run  him  in.  Then  two 
villains,  three  extra  hired  ruffians,  and  four  detec- 
tives are  about  his  fighting  weight. 


i6 


STAGE-LAND. 


If  he  knocks  down  less  than  three  men  with  one 
blow,  he  fears  that  he  must  be  ill,  and  wonders 
"Why  this  strange  weakness." 

The  hero  has  his  own  way  of  making  love.  He 
always  does  it  from  behind.  The  girl  turns  away 


BREATHES   HIS   ATTACHMENT   DOWN   HER   BACK. 

from  him,  when  he  begins  (she  being,  as  we  have 
said,  shy  and  timid),  and  he  takes  hold  of  her 
hands,  and  breathes  his  attachment  down  her  back. 
The  Stage  hero  always  wears  patent  leather 
boots,  and  they  are  always  spotlessly  clean. 


THE  HERO.  1? 

Sometimes  he  is  rich,  and  lives  in  a  room  with 
seven  doors  to  it,  and  at  other  times  he  is  starv- 
ing in  a  garret ;  but  in  either  event,  he  still  wears 
brand-new  patent  leather  boots. 

He  might  raise  at  least  three  and  sixpence  on 
those  boots,  and,  when  the  baby  is  crying  for 
food,  it  occurs  to  us  that  it  would  be  better  if, 
instead  of  praying  to  Heaven,  he  took  off  those 
boots  and  pawned  them ;  but  this  does  not  seem 
to  occur  to  him. 

He  crosses  the  African  desert  in  patent  leather 
boots,  does  the  Stage  hero.  He  takes  a  supply 
with  him,  when  he  is  wrecked  on  an  uninhabited 
island.  He  arrives  from  long  and  trying  journeys ; 
his  clothes  are  ragged  and  torn ;  but  his  boots  are 
new  and  shiny.  He  puts  on  patent  leather  boots 
to  tramp  through  the  Australian  bush,  to  fight  in 
Egypt,  to  discover  the  North  Pole. 

Sometimes  he  is  a  gold  digger,  sometimes  a  dock 
laborer,  sometimes  a  soldier,  sometimes  a  sailor, 
but,  whatever  he  is,  he  wears  patent  leather  boots. 

He  goes  boating  in  patent  leather  boots,  he 
plays  cricket  in  them ;  he  goes  fishing  and  shoot- 
ing in  them.  He  will  go  to  Heaven  in  patent 
leather  boots,  or  he  will  decline  the  invitation. 

The  Stage  hero  never  talks  in  a  simple,  straight- 
forward way,  like  a  mere  ordinary  mortal. 


i8 


STAGE-LAND. 


"You  will  write  to  me,  when  you  are  away, 
Dear,  won't  you,"  says  the  heroine. 

A  mere  human  being  would  reply : 

"Why,  of  course  I  shall,  Ducky,  every  day." 

But  the  Stage  hero  is  a  superior  creature.  He 
says: 

"Dost'  see  yonder  star,  Sweet?" 

She  looks  up,  and  owns  that  she  does  see  yonder 
star;  and  then  off  he  starts  and  drivels  on  about 
that  star  for  full  five  minutes,  and  says  he  will 
cease  to  write  to  her  when  that  pale  star  has  fallen 
from  its  place  amidst  the  firmament  of  Heaven. 

The  result  of  a  long  course  of  acquaintance- 
ship with  Stage  heroes  has  been,  so  far  as  we  are 
concerned,  to  create  a  yearning  for  a  new  kind  of 
Stage  hero.  What  we  would  like,  for  a  change, 
would  be  a  man  who  wouldn't  cackle  and  brag 
quite  so  much,  but  who  was  capable  of  taking 
care  of  himself  for  a  day,  without  getting  into 
trouble. 


THE  STAGE  HERO  ALWAYS  WEARS  PATENT  LEATHER  BOOTS. 


otage   Villain .» 


IDUlain. 


WEARS  a  clean  collar, 
and  smokes  a  cigar- 
ette  ;  that  is  how  we 
know  he  is  a  villain.  In  real 
life,  it  is  often  difficult  to  tell  a 
villain  from  an  honest  man,  and 
this  gives  rise  to  mistakes  ;  but,  on  the  stage,  as 
we  have  said,  villains  wear  clean  collars  and 
smoke  cigarettes,  and  thus  all  fear  of  blunder  is 
avoided. 

It  is  well  that  the  rule  does  not  hold  off  the 
stage,  or  good  men  might  be  misjudged.  We  our- 
selves, for  instance,  wear  a  clean  collar  —  some- 
times. 

It  might  be  very  awkward  for  our  family,  especi- 
ally on  Sundays. 

He  has  no  power  of  repartee,  has  the  Stage  vil- 
lain. All  the  good  people  in  the  play  say  rude 
and  insulting  things  to  him,  and  snack  at  him,  and 
score  off  him,  all  through  the  act,  but  he  can  never 

21 


22 


STAGE-LAND. 


answer  them  back — can  never  think  of  anything 
clever  to  say  in  return. 

"Ha,  ha,  wait  till  Monday  week,"  is  the  most 
brilliant  retort  that  he  can  make,  and  he  has  to 
get  into  a  corner  by  himself  to  think  of  even  that. 

The  Stage  villain's  career  is  always  very  easy 


HE   GETS  SUDDENLY   LET  IN — GENERALLY    BY  THE  COMIC  MAN. 

and  prosperous  up  to  within  a  minute  of  the  end 
of  each  act.  Then  he  gets  suddenly  let  in,  gener- 
ally by  the  comic  man.  It  always  happens  so. 
Yet  the  villain  is  always  intensely  surprised  each 
time.  He  never  seems  to  learn  anything  from 
experience. 


THE   VILLAIN.  23 

A  few  years  ago  the  villain  used  to  be  blessed 
with  a  hopeful  and  philosophical  temperament, 
which  enabled  him  to  bear  up  under  these  con- 
stantly recurring  disappointments  and  reverses. 
It  was  "no  matter,"  he  would  say.  Crushed  for 


A   TIME   WILL  COME. 


the  moment,  though  he  might  be,  his  buoyant 
heart  never  lost  courage.  He  had  a  simple,  child- 
like faith  in  Providence.  "A  time  will  come,"  he 
would  remark,  and  this  idea  consoled  him. 

Of  late,  however,  this  trusting  hopefulness  of 
his,  as  expressed  in  the  beautiful  lines  we  have 


24  STAGE-LAND. 

quoted,  appears  to  have  forsaken  him  We  are 
sorry  for  this,  we  always  regarded  it  as  one  of  the 
finest  traits  in  his  character. 

The  Stage  villain's  love  for  the  heroine  is  sub- 
lime in  its  steadfastness.  She  is  a  woman  of 
lugubrious  and  tearful  disposition,  added  to  which 
she  is  usually  encumbered  with  a  couple  of  prig- 
gish and  highly  objectionable  children,  and  what 
possible  attraction  there  is  about  her  we  ourselves 
can  never  understand ;  but  the  Stage  villain — well 
there,  he  is  fairly  mashed  on  her. 

Nothing  can  alter  his  affection.  She  hates  him 
and  insults  him  to  an  extent  that  is  really  unlady- 
like. Every  time  he  tries  to  explain  his  devotion 
to  her,  the  hero  comes  in  and  knocks  him  down 
in  the  middle  of  it,  or  the  comic  man  catches  him 
during  one  or  the  other  of  his  harassing  love 
scenes  with  her,  and  goes  off  and  tells  the  "vil- 
lagers" or  the  "guests,"  and  they  come  round 
and  nag  him  (we  should  think  that  the  villain 
must  grow  to  positively  dislike  the  comic  man 
before  the  piece  is  over). 

Notwithstanding  all  this  he  still  hankers  after 
her,  and  swears  she  shall  be  his.  He  is  not  a  bad- 
looking  fellow,  and  from  what  we  know  of  the 
market,  we  should  say  there  are  plenty  of  other 


THE   VILLAIN.  25 

girls  who  would  jump  at  him ;  yet  for  the  sake  of 
settling  down  with  this  dismal  young  female  as 
his  wife,  he  is  prepared  to  go  through  a  laborious 
and  exhausting  course  of  crime,  and  to  be  bullied 
and  insulted  by  every  one  he  meets.  His  love 
sustains  him  under  it  all.  He  robs  and  forges,  and 
cheats,  and  lies,  and  murders,  and  arsons.  If  there 
were  any  other  crimes  he  could  commit  to  win  her 
affection,  he  would,  for  her  sweet  sake,  commit 
them  cheerfully.  But  he  doesn't  know  any 
others — at  all  events,  he  is  not  well  up  in  any 
others — and  she  still  does  not  care  for  him,  and 
what  is  he  to  do? 

It  is  very  unfortunate  for  both  of  them.  It  is 
evident,  to  the  merest  spectator,  that  the  lady's 
life  would  be  much  happier  if  the  villain  did  not 
love  her  quite  so  much  :  and,  as  for  him,  his  career 
might  be  calmer,  and  less  criminal,  but  for  his 
deep  devotion  to  her. 

You  see  it  is  having  met  her  in  early  life  that  is 
the  cause  of  all  the  trouble.  He  first  saw  her 
when  she  was  a  child,  and  he  loved  her,  "aye,  even 
then."  Ah,  and  he  would  have  worked — slaved 
for  her,  and  have  made  her  rich  and  happy.  He 
might,  perhaps,  even  have  been  a  good  man. 

She  tries  to  soothe  him.     She  says  she  loathed 


26  STAGE-LAND. 

him  with  an  unspeakable  horror  from  the  first  mo- 
ment that  her  eyes  met  his  revolting  form.  She 
says  she  saw  a  hideous  toad  once  in  a  nasty  pond, 
and  she  says  that  rather  would  she  take  that  noi- 
some reptile,  and  clasp  its  slimy  bosom  to  her 
own,  than  tolerate  one  instant's  touch  from  his 
(the  villain's)  arms. 

This  sweet  prattle  of  hers,  however,  only  charms 
him  all  the  more.  He  says  he  will  win  her  yet. 

Nor  does  the  villain  seem  much  happier  in  his 
less  serious  love  episodes.  After  he  has  indulged 
in  a  little  badinage  of  the  above  character  with  his 
real  lady  love,  the  heroine,  he  will  occasionally  try 
a  little  light  flirtation  passage  with  her  maid  or 
lady  friend. 

The  maid,  or  friend,  does  not  waste  time  in 
simile  or  metaphor.  She  calls  him  a  black-hearted 
scoundrel,  and  clumps  him  over  the  head. 

Of  recent  years  it  has  been  attempted  to  cheer 
the  Stage  villain's  loveless  life  by  making  the  vil- 
lage clergyman's  daughter  gone  on  him.  But  it 
is  generally  about  ten  years  ago,  when  even  she 
loved  him,  and  her  love  has  turned  to  hate  by  the 
time  the  play  opens;  so  that,  on  the  whole,  his  lot 
can  hardly  be  said  to  have  been  much  improved 
in  this  direction. 


THE   VILLAIN.  27 

Not  but  what  it  must  be  confessed  that  her 
change  of  feeling  is,  under  the  circumstances,  only 
natural.  He  took  her  away  from  her  happy  peace- 
ful home,  when  she  was  very  young,  and  brought 
her  up  to  this  wicked  overgrown  London.  He 
did  not  marry  her.  There  is  no  earthly  reason 
why  he  should  not  have  married  her.  She  must 
have  been  a  fine  girl  at  that  time  (and  she  is  a 
good-looking  woman  as  it  is,  with  dash  and  go 
about  her),  and  any  other  man  would  have  settled 
down  cosily  with  her,  and  have  led  a  simple,  blame- 
less life. 

But  the  Stage  villain  is  built  cussed. 

He  ill  uses  this  female  most  shockingly — not  for 
any  cause  or  motive  whatever,  indeed  his  own 
practical  interests  should  prompt  him  to  treat  her 
well,  and  keep  friends  with  her — but  from  the 
natural  cussedness  to  which  we  have  just  alluded. 

When  he  speaks  to  her,  he  seizes  her  by  the 
wrist  and  breathes  what  he's  got  to  say  into  her 
ear,  and  it  tickles  and  revolts  her. 

The  only  thing  in  which  he  is  good  to  her  .is  in 
the  matter  of  dress.  He  does  not  stint  her  in 
dress. 

The  Stage  villain  is  superior  to  the  villain  of 
real  life.  The  villain  of  real  life  is  actuated  by 


28  STAGE-LAND. 

mere  sordid  and  selfish  motives.  The  Stage  vil- 
lain does  villainy  not  for  any  personal  advantage 
to  himself,  but  merely  from  the  love  of  the  thing, 
as  an  art.  Villainy  is,  to  him,  its  own  reward  ;  he 
revels  in  it. 

"Better  far  be  poor  and  villainous,"  he  says  to 


IT  TICKLES  AND   REVOLTS   HER. 


himself,  "than  possess  all  the  wealth  of  the  Indes, 
with  a  clear  conscience."  "I  will  be  a  villain,"  he 
cries,  "I  will,  at  great  expense  and  inconvenience 
to  myself,  murder  the  good  old  man,  get  the  hero 


THE   VILLAIN.  29 

accused  of  the  crime,  and  make  love  to  his  wife, 
while  he  is  in  prison.  It  will  be  a  risky  and 
laborious  business  for  me,  from  beginning  to  end, 
and  bring  me  no  practical  advantage  whatever. 
The  girl  will  call  me  insulting  names,  when  I  pay 
her  a  visit,  and  will  push  me  violently  in  the  chest 
when  I  get  near  her ;  her  golden-haired  infant  will 
say  I  am  a  bad  man,  and  may  even  refuse  to  kiss 
me.  The  comic  man  will  cover  me  with  humor- 
ous opprobrium;  and  the  villagers  will  get  a  day 
off,  and  hang  about  the  village  pub  and  hoot  me. 
Everybody  will  see  through  my  villainy,  and  I 
shall  be  nabbed  in  the  end.  I  always  am.  But 
it  is  no  matter,  I  will  be  a  villain,  ha,  ha !" 

On  the  whole,  the  Stage  villain  appears  to  us  to 
be  a  rather  badly  used  individual.  He  never  has 
any  "estates"  or  property  himself,  and  his  only 
chance  of  getting  on  in  the  world  is  to  sneak  the 
hero's.  He  has  an  affectionate  disposition,  and, 
never  having  any  wife  of  his  own,  he  is  compelled 
to  love  other  people's:  but  his  affection  is  ever 
unrequited,  and  everything  comes  wrong  for  him 
in  the  end. 

Our  advice  to  Stage  villains  generally,  after 
careful  observation  of  (stage)  life,  and  (stage)  hu- 
man nature,  is  as  follows — 


3°  STAGE-LAND. 

Never  be  a  Stage  villain  at  all,  if  you  can  help 
it.  The  life  is  too  harassing,  and  the  remunera- 
tion altogether  disproportionate  to  the  risks  and 
labor. 

If  you  have  run  away  with  the  clergyman's 
daughter,  and  she  still  clings  to  you,  do  not  throw 
her  down  in  the  center  of  the  stage,  and  call  her 
names.  It  only  irritates  her,  and  she  takes  a  dis- 
like to  you,  and  goes  and  warns  the  other  girl. 

Don't  have  too  many  accomplices;  and  if  you 
have  got  them,  don't  keep  sneering  at  them  and 
bullying  them.  A  word  from  them  can  hang  you, 
and  yet  you  do  all  you  can  to  rile  them.  Treat 
them  civilly,  and  let  them  have  their  fair  share  of 
the  swag.  Beware  of  the  comic  man.  When  you 
are  committing  a  murder,  or  robbing  a  safe,  you 
never  look  to  see  where  the  comic  man  is.  You 
are  so  careless  in  that  way.  On  the  whole,  it 
might  be  as  well  if  you  murdered  the  comic  man 
early  in  the  play. 

Don't  make  love  to  the  hero's  wife.  She 
doesn't  like  you;  how  can  you  expect  her  to? 
Besides,  it  isn't  proper.  Why  don't  you  get  a  girl 
of  your  own? 

Lastly,  don't  go  down  to  the  scenes  of  your 
crimes  in  the  last  act.  You  always  will  do  this. 


THE   VILLAIN.  31 

We  suppose  it  is  some  extra  cheap  excursion  down 
there  that  attracts  you.  But  you  take  our  advice, 
and  don't  you  go.  That  is  always  where  you  get 
nabbed.  The  police  know  your  habits  from  ex- 
perience. They  do  not  trouble  to  look  for  you. 
They  go  down,  in  the  last  act,  to  the  old  hall,  or 
the  ruined  mill,  where  you  did  the  deed,  and  wait 
for  you. 

In  nine  cases  out  of  ten  you  would  get  off  scot 
free  but  for  this  idiotic  custom  of  yours.  Do  keep 
away  from  the  place.  Go  abroad,  or  to  the  sea- 
side when  the  last  act  begins,  and  stop  there  till 
it  is  over.  You  will  be  safe  then. 


Iberoine. 


IS    always     in 
trouble — and  don't 
she  let  you  know 
>   it,    too.     Her   life 
*£   is    undeniably    a 
'     hard  one. 
Nothing    goes    right 
with  her.      We  all  have  our 
troubles,  but  the  Stage  heroine 
never  has   anything  else.     If  she   only   got  one 
afternoon  a  week  off  from  trouble,  or  had    her 
Sundays  free,  it  would  be  something. 

But  no !  misfortune  stalks  beside  her  from 
week's  beginning  to  week's  end. 

After  her  husband  has  been  found  guilty  of 
murder,  which  is  about  the  least  thing  that  can 
ever  happen  to  him,  and  her  white-haired  father- 
has  become  a  bankrupt,  and  has  died  of  a  broken 
heart,  and  the  home  of  her  childhood  has  been 

35 


3°  STAGE-LAND. 

sold    up,  then   her  infant   goes   and    contracts   a 
lingering  fever. 

She  weeps  a  good  deal  during  the  course  of  her 
troubles,  which, we  suppose,  is  only  natural  enough, 
poor  woman.  But  it  is  depressing  from  the  point 
of  view  of  the  audience,  and  we  almost  wish,  be- 


HER   WHITE-HAIRED    FATHER    HAS   BECOME   A    BANKRUPT. 

fore  the  evening  is  out,  that  she  had  not  got  quite 
so  much  trouble. 

It  is  over  the  child  that  she  does  most  of  her 
weeping.  The  child  has  a  damp  time  of  it 
altogether.  We  sometimes  wonder  that  it  never 
catches  rheumatism. 


THE  HEROINE. 


37 


She  is  very  good,  is  the  Stage  heroine.  The 
comic  man  expresses  a  belief  that  she  is  a  born 
angel.  She  reproves  him  for  this  with  a  tearful 
smile  (it  wouldn't  be  her  smile  if  it  wasn't  tearful). 

"Oh  no,"  she  says  (sadly  of  course),  "I  have 
many,  many  faults." 

We  rather  wish   that  she  would  show  them  a 


THE   COMIC    MAN    EXPRESSES   A    BELIEF  THAT  SHE   IS   A    BORN    ANGKL. 

little  more.  Her  excessive  goodness  seems  some- 
how to  pall  upon  us.  Our  only  consolation,  while 
watching  her,  is  that  there  are  not  many  good 
women  off  the  stage.  Life  is  bad  enough,  as  it  is; 
if  there  were  many  women,  in  real  life,  as  good  as 
the  Stage  heroine,  it  would  be  unbearable. 


38  ST AGE-LA  XD. 

The  stage  heroine's  only  pleasure  in  life  is  to 
go  out  in  a  snowstorm  without  an  umbrella,  and 
with  no  bonnet  on.  She  has  a  bonnet,  we  know 
(rather  a  tasteful  little  thing),  we  have  seen  it 
hanging  up  behind  the  door  of  her  room ;  but 
when  she  comes  out  for  a  night  stroll,  during  a 
heavy  snowstorm  (accompanied  by  ;hunder),  she 
is  most  careful  to  leave  it  at  home.  Maybe  she 
fears  the  snow  will  spoil  it,  and  she  is  a  careful  girl. 

She  always  brings  her  child  out  with  her  on 
these  excursions.  She  seems  to  think  that  it  will 
freshen  it  up.  The  child  does  not  appreciate  the 
snow  as  much  as  she  does.  He  says  it's  cold. 

One  thing  that  must  irritate  the  Stage  heroine 
very  much,  on  these  occasions,  is  the  way  in  which 
the  snow  seems  to  lie  in  wait  for  her,  and  follow 
her  about.  It  is  quite  a  fine  night,  before  she 
comes  on  the  scene :  the  moment  she  appears,  it 
begins  to  snow.  It  snows  heavily  all  the  while 
she  remains  about,  and,  the  instant  she  goes,  it 
clears  up  again,  and  keeps  dry  for  the  rest  of  the 
evening. 

The  way  the  snow  "goes"  for  that  poor  woman 
is  most  unfair.  It  always  snows  much  heavier  in 
the  particular  spot  where  she  is  sitting,  than  it 
does  anywhere  else  in  the  whole  street.  Why,  we 


THE  HEROINE.  39 

have  sometimes  seen  a  heroine,  sitting  in  the  midst 
of  a  blinding  snowstorm,  while  the  other  side  of 
the  road  was  as  dry  as  a  bone.  And  it  never 
seemed  to  occur  to  her  to  cross  over. 

We  have  even  kown  a  more  than  usually  malig- 
nant snowstorm  to  follow  a  heroine  three  times 
round  the  stage,  and  then  go  off  R.  with  her. 

Of  course,  you  can't  get  away  from  a  snowstorm 
like  that !  A  Stage  snowstorm  is  the  kind  of 
snowstorm  that  would  follow  you  upstairs,  and 
want  to  come  into  bed  with  you. 

Another  curious  thing  about  these  Stage  snow- 
storms is  that  the  moon  is  always  shining  brightly 
throughout  the  whole  of  them.  And  it  shines 
only  on  the  heroine,  and  it  follows  her  about,  just 
like  the  snow  does. 

Nobody  fully  understands  what  a  wonderful 
work  of  nature  the  moon  is  except  people  ac- 
quainted with  the  stage.  Astronomy  teaches  you 
something  about  the  moon,  but  you  learn  a  good 
deal  more  from  a  few  visits  to  a  theater.  You  will 
find  from  the  latter  that  the  moon  only  shines  on 
heroes  and  heroines,  with,  perhaps,  an  occasional 
beam  on  the  comic  man :  it  always  goes  out  when 
it  sees  the  villain  coming. 

It  is  surprising,  too,  how  quickly  the  moon  can 


4°  STAGE-LAND. 

go  out  on  the  stage.  At  one  moment  it  is  riding 
in  full  radiance  in  the  midst  of  a  cloudless  sky, 
and  the  next  instant  it  is  gone !  Just  as  though  it 
had  been  turned  off  at  the  meter.  It  makes  you 
quite  giddy  at  first,  until  you  get  used  to  it. 

The  Stage  heroine  is  inclined  to  thougthfulness 
rather  than  gaiety. 

In  her  cheerful  moments  the  Stage  heroine 
thinks  she  sees  the  spirit  of  her  mother,  or  the 
ghost  of  her  father,  or  she  dreams  of  her  dead 
baby. 

But  this  is  only  in  her  very  merry  moods.  As 
a  rule,  she  is  too  much  occupied  with  weeping  to 
have  time  for  frivolous  reflections. 

She  has  a  great  flow  of  language,  and  a  wonder- 
ful gift  of  metaphor  and  simile — more  forcible 
than  elegant — and  this  might  be  rather  trying  in 
a  wife,  under  ordinary  circumstances.  But  as  the 
hero  is  generally  sentenced  to  ten  years'  penal 
servitude,  on  his  wedding  morn,  he  escapes,  for  a 
period,  from  a  danger  that  might  well  appal  a  less 
fortunate  bridegroom. 

Sometimes  the  Stage  heroine  has  a  brother,  and 
if  so,  he  is  sure  to  be  mistaken  for  her  lover.  We 
never  came  across  a  brother  and  sister,  in  real  life, 
who  ever  gave  the  most  suspicious  person  any 


THE  HEROINE.  41 

grounds  for  mistaking  them  for  lovers;  but  the 
Stage  brother  and  sister  are  so  affectionate  that 
the  error  is  excusable. 

And  when  the  mistake  does  occur,  and  the  hus- 


THE   STAGE    BROTHER    AND   SISTER   ARE  SO  AFFECTIONATE. 

band  comes  in  suddenly  and  finds  them  kissing 
and  raves,  she  doesn't  turn  round  and  say  :  "Why 
you  silly  cuckoo,  it's  only  my  brother." 

That  would  be  simple  and  sensible,  and  would 


42  STAGE-LAND. 

not  suit  the  Stage  heroine  at  all.  No,  she  does 
all  in  her  power  to  make  everybody  believe  it  is 
true,  so  that  she  can  surfer  in  silence. 

She  does  so  love  to  suffer. 

Marriage  is  undoubtedly  a  failure  in  the  case  of 
the  Stage  heroine. 

If  the  Stage  heroine  were  well  advised  she 
would  remain  single.  Her  husband  means  well. 
He  is  decidedly  affectionate.  But  he  is  unfortu- 
nate and  inexperienced  in  worldly  affairs.  Things 
come  right  for  him  at  the  end  of  the  play,  it  is 
true ;  but  we  would  not  recommend  the  heroine 
to  place  too  much  reliance  upon  the  continuance 
of  this  happy  state  of  affairs.  From  what  we  have 
seen  of  her  husband  and  his  business  capabilities, 
during  the  five  acts  preceding,  we  are  inclined  to 
doubt  the  possibility  of  his  being  anything  but 
unfortunate  to  the  end  of  his  career. 

True  he  has  at  last  got  his  "rights"  (which  he 
would  never  have  lost  had  he  had  a  head  instead 
of  a  sentimental  bladder  on  his  shoulders),  the  vil- 
lain is  handcuffed,  and  he  and  the  heroine  have 
settled  down  comfortably,  next  door  to  the  comic 
man. 

But  this  heavenly  existence  will  never  last. 
The  Stage  hero  was  built  for  trouble,  and  he  will 


THE  HEROINE.  43 

be  in  it  again  in  another  month,  you  bet.  They'll 
get  up  another  mortgage  for  him  on  the  "estates" ; 
and  he  won't  know,  bless  you,  whether  he  really 
did  sign  it,  or  whether  he  didn't,  and  out  he 
will  go. 

And  he'll  slop  his  name  about  to  documents 
without  ever  looking  to  see  what  he's  doing,  and 
be  let  in  for  Lord  knows  what ;  and  another  wife 
will  turn  up  for  him  that  he  had  married,  when  a 
boy,  and  forgotten  all  about. 

And  the  next  corpse  that  comes  to  the  village 
he'll  get  mixed  up  with — sure  to — and  have  it  laid 
to  his  door,  and  there'll  be  all  the  old  business 
over  again. 

No,  our  advice  to  the  Stage  heroine  is,  to  get 
rid  of  the  herj  as  soon  as  possible,  marry  the  vil- 
lain, and  go  and  live  abroad,  somewhere  where  the 
comic  man  won't  come  fooling  around. 

She  will  be  much  happier. 


Comic  flDan. 


FOLLOWS  the  hero  all 
over  the  world.  This  is 
rough  on  the  hero. 

What    makes    him    so 
gone  on  the  hero  is  that,  when 
f        ^     ,;    they  \vere  boys  together,  the  hero 

.-^ii£'i.'JiS-''''^»'-> ' 

used  to  knock  him  down  and  kick 
him.  The  comic  man  remembers  this  with  a 
glow  of  pride,  when  he  is  grown  up;  and  it 
makes  him  love  the  hero  and  determine  to 
devote  his  life  to  him. 

He  is  a  man  of  humble  station — the  comic  man. 
The  village  blacksmith  or  a  pedlar.  You  never 
see  a  rich  or  aristocratic  comic  man  on  the  stage. 
You  can  have  your  choice  on  the  stage;  you  can 
be  funny  and  of  lowly  origin,  or  you  can  be  well- 
to-do  and  without  any  sense  of  humor.  Peers  and 
policemen  are  the  people  most  utterly  devoid  of 
humor  on  the  stage. 

The  chief  duty  of  the  comic  man's  life  is  to 

47 


48 


STAGE-LAND. 


make  love  to  servant  girls,  and  they  slap  his  face ; 
but  it  does  not  discourage  him ;  he  seems  to  be 
more  smitten  by  them  than  ever. 

The  comic  man  is  happy  under  any  fate,  and 
he  says  funny  things  at  funerals,  and  when  the 
bailiffs  are  in  the  house,  or  the  hero  is  waiting  to 
be  hanged.  This  sort  of  man  is  rather  trying  in 


THEY   SLAP    HIS   FACE. 


real  life.  In  real  life  such  a  man  would  probably 
be  slaughtered  to  death,  and  buried  at  an  early 
period  of  his  career,  but  on  the  stage  they  put  up 
with  him. 

He  is  very  good,  is  the  comic  man.     He  can't 
abear  villainy.    To  thwart  villainy  is  his  life's  ambi- 


THE  COMIC  MAN.  49 

tion,  and  in  this  noble  object  fortune  backs  him 
up  grandly.  Bad  people  come  and  commit  their 
murders  and  thefts  right  under  his  nose,  so  that 
he  can  denounce  them  in  the  last  act. 

They  never  see  him  there,  standing  close  beside 
them,  while  they  are  performing  these  fearful 
crimes. 

It  is  marvelous  how  short-sighted  people  on  the 
stage  are.  We  always  thought  that  the  young 
lady  in  real  life  was  moderately  good  at  not  see- 
ing folks  she  did  not  want  to,  when  they  were 
standing  straight  in  front  of  her,  but  her  affliction 
in  this  direction  is  as  nothing  compared  with  that 
of  her  brothers  and  sisters  on  the  stage. 

These  unfortunate  people  come  into  rooms 
where  there  are  crowds  of  people  about — people 
that  it  is  most  important  that  they  should  see,  and 
owing  to  not  seeing  whom  they  get  themselves 
into  fearful  trouble,  and  they  never  notice  any  of 
them.  They  talk  to  somebody  opposite,  and 
they  can't  see  a  third  person  that  is  standing 
bang  between  the  two  of  them. 

You  might  fancy  they  wore  blinkers. 

Then,  again,  their  hearing  is  so  terribly  weak. 
It  really  ought  to  be  seen  to.  People  talk  and 
chatter  at  the  very  top  of  their  voices,  close  be- 


5°  STAGE-LAND. 

hind  them,  and  they  never  hear  a  word — don't 
know  anybody's  there,  even.  After  it  has  been 
going  on  for  half  an  hour,  and  the  people  "up 
stage'  have  made  themselves  hoarse  with  shout- 
ing, and  somebody  has  been  boisterously  mur- 
dered, and  all  the  furniture  upset,  then  the  people 
"down  stage"  "think  they  hear  a  noise." 


THE   COMIC    MAN   ALWAYS   ROWS   WITH    HIS   WIFE. 

The  comic  man  always  rows  with  his  wife,  if  he 
is  married,  or  with  his  sweetheart,  if  he  is  not 
married.  They  quarrel  all  day  long.  It  must  be 
a  trying  life,  you  would  think,  but  they  appear  to 
like  it. 

How  the  comic  man  lives  and  supports  his  wife 


THE   COMIC  MAN.  51 

(she  looks  as  if  it  wanted  something  to  support 
her,  too),  and  family  is  always  a  mystery  to  us. 
As  we  have  said,  he  is  not  a  rich  man,  and  he 
never  seems  to  earn  any  money.  Sometimes  he 
keeps  a  shop,  and,  in  the  way  he  manages  busi- 
ness, it  must  be  an  expensive  thing  to  keep,  for 
he  never  charges  anybody  for  anything,  he  is  so 
generous.  All  his  customers  seem  to  be  people 
more  or  less  in  trouble,  and  he  can't  find  it  in  his 
heart  to  ask  them  to  pay  for  their  goods,  under 
such  distressing  circumstances. 

He  stuffs  their  basket  full  with  twice  as  much  as 
they  came  to  buy,  pushes  their  money  back  into 
their  hands,  and  wipes  away  a  tear. 

Why  doesn't  a  comic  man  come  and  set  up  a 
grocery  store  in  our  neighborhood? 

When  the  shop  does  not  prove  sufficiently 
profitable  (as  under  the  above-explained  method 
sometimes  happens  to  be  the  case)  the  comic 
man's  wife  seeks  to  add  to  the  income  by  taking 
in  lodgers.  This  is  a  bad  move  on  her  part,  for  it 
always  ends  in  the  lodgers  taking  her  in.  The 
hero  and  heroine,  who  seem  to  have  been  waiting 
for  something  of  the  sort,  immediately  come  and 
take  possession  of  the  whole  house. 

Of  course  the  comic  man  could  not  think  of 


52  STAGE-LAND. 

charging,  for  mere  board  and  lodging,  the  man 
who  knocked  him  down  when  they  were  boys 
together!  Besides,  was  not  the  heroine  (now  the 
hero's  wife)  the  sweetest  and  the  blithest  girl  in 
all  the  village  of  Deepdale?  (They  must  have 
been  a  gloomy  band,  the  others !)  How  can  any- 
one with  a  human  heart  beneath  his  bosom  sug- 
gest that  people  like  that  should  pay  for  their  rent 
and  washing! 

The  comic  man  is  shocked  at  his  wife  for  even 
thinking  of  such  a  thing,  and  the  end  of  it  is  that 
Mr.  and  Mrs.  Hero  live  there  for  the  rest  of  the 
play,  rent  free;  coals,  soap,  candles,  and  hair  oil 
for  the  child,  being  provided  for  them  on  the  same 
terms. 

The  hero  raises  vague  and  feeble  objections  to 
this  arrangement  now  and  again.  He  says  he  will 
not  hear  of  such  a  thing,  that  he  will  stay  no 
longer  to  be  a  burden  upon  these  honest  folk, 
but  will  go  forth  unto  the  roadside,  and  there 
starve.  The  comic  man  has  awful  work  with 
him,  but  wins  at  last,  and  persuades  the  noble 
fellow  to  stop  on,  and  give  the  place  another 
trial. 

When,  a  morning  or  so  after  witnessing  one  of 
these  beautiful  scenes,  our  own  landlady  knocks  at 


THE   COMIC  MAN.  53 

our  door  and  creates  a  disturbance  over  a  paltry 
matter  of  three  or  four  weeks'  rent,  and  says  she'll 
have  her  money  or  out  we  go  that  very  day,  and 
drifts  slowly  away  down  toward  the  kitchen,  abus- 
ing us  in  a  rising  voice  as  she  descends,  then  we 
think  of  these  things  and  grow  sad. 

It  is  the  example  of  the  people  round  him  that 
makes  the  comic  man  so  generous.  Everybody  is 
generous  on  the  stage.  They  are  giving  away 
their  purses  all  day  long:  that  is  the  regulation 
"tip"on  the  stage, — one's  purse.  The  moment 
you  hear  a  tale  of  woe,  you  grab  it  out  of  your 
pocket,  slap  it  into  the  woe-or's  palm,  grip  his 
hand,  dash  away  a  tear,  and  exit :  you  don't  even 
leave  yourself  a  bus  fare  home.  You  walk  back 
quickly,  and  get  another  purse. 

Middle-class  people  and  others,  on  the  stage, 
who  are  short  of  purses,  have  to  content  them- 
selves with  throwing  about  rolls  of  bank-notes,  and 
.tipping  servants  with  five  pound  checks.  Very 
stingy  people,  on  the  stage,  have  been  known  to 
be  so  cussed  mean  as  to  give  away  mere  sover- 
eigns. 

But  they  are  generally  only  villains  or  lords 
that  descend  to  this  sort  of  thing.  Respectable 
stage  folk  never  offer  anything  less  than  a  purse. 


54  STAGE-LAND. 

The  recipient  is  very  grateful  on  receiving  the 
purse,  (he  never  looks  inside,)  and  thinks  Heaven 
ought  to  reward  the  donor.  They  get  a  lot  of 
work  out  of  Heaven,  on  the  stage.  Heaven  does 
all  the  odd  jobs  for  them  that  they  don't  want  to 
go  to  the  trouble  and  expense  of  doing  for  them- 
selves. Heaven's  chief  duty,  on  the  stage,  is  to 
see  to  the  repayment  of  all  those  sums  of  money 
that  are  given  or  lent  to  the  good  people.  It  is 
generally  requested  to  do  this  to  the  tune  of  a 
"thousandfold,"  an  exorbitant  rate,  when  you 
come  to  think  of  it. 

Heaven  is  also  expected  to  take  care  that  the 
villain  gets  properly  cursed,  and  to  fill  up  its  spare 
time  by  bringing  misfortune  upon  the  local  land- 
lord. It  is  to  avenge  everybody,  and  to  help  all 
the  good  people  whenever  they  are  in  trouble. 
And  they  keep  it  going  in  this  direction. 

And  when  the  hero  leaves  for  prison,  Heaven 
has  to  take  care  of  his  wife  and  child  till  he  comes 
out ;  and  if  this  isn't  a  handful  for  it,  we  don't 
know  what  would  be  ! 

Heaven,  on  the  stage,  is  always  on  the  side  of 
the  hero  and  heroine,  and  against  the  rogue. 

Occasionally,  of  late  years,  the  comic  man  has 
been  a  bad  man,  but  you  can't  hate  him  for  it. 


THE    COMIC  MAN.  55 

What  if  he  does  ruin  the  hero  and  rob  the 
heroine,  and  help  to  murder  the  good  old  man ! 
He  does  it  all  in  such  a  genial,  light-hearted  spirit, 
that  it  is  not  in  one's  heart  to  feel  angry  with  him. 
It  is  the  way  in  which  a  thing  is  done  that  makes 
all  the  difference. 

Besides,  he  is  always  round  on  his  pal,  the  seri- 
ous villain,  at  the  end,  and  that  makes  it  all  right. 

The  comic  man  is  not  a  sportsman.  If  he  goes 
out  shooting,  we  know  that  when  he  returns  we 
shall  hear  that  he  has  shot  the  dog.  If  he  takes 
his  girl  out  on  the  river  he  upsets  her  (literally 
we  mean).  The  comic  man  never  goes  out  for  a 
day's  pleasure  without  coming  home  a  wreck. 

If  he  merely  goes  to  tea  with  his  girl  at  her 
mother's,  he  swallows  a  muffin  and  chokes  him- 
self. 

The  comic  man  is  not  happy  in  his  married  life, 
nor  does  it  seem  to  us  that  he  goes  the  right  way 
to  be  so.  He  calls  his  wife  "his  old  Dutch  clock," 
"the  old  geyser,"  and  such  like  terms  of  endear- 
ment, and  addresses  her  with  such  remarks  as 
"Ah,  you  old  cat,"  "You  ugly  old  nutmeg  grater," 
"You  orangamatang,  you  !"  etc.,  etc. 

Well,  you  know,  that  is  not  the  way  to  make 
things  pleasant  about  a  house. 


STAGE-LAND. 


Still,  with  all  his  faults,  we  like  the  comic  man. 
He  is  not  always  in  trouble,  and  he  does  not  make 
long  speeches. 

Let  us  bless  him. 


COMES  HOME   A  WRECK. 


1O 
eOtage  JLawyer. 


Xawper. 


IS  very  old,  and  very  long, 
and  very  thin.  He  has  white 
hair.  He  dresses  in  the  cos- 
tume of  the  last  generation 
but  seven.  He  has  bushy  eye- 
brows, and  is  clean  shaven.  His 
chin  itches,  considerably,  so  that 
he  has  to  be  always  scratching  it.  His  favorite 
remark  is  "Ah." 

In  real  life,  we  have  heard  of  young  solicitors, 
of  foppish  solicitors,  of  short  solicitors  ;  but,  on 
the  stage,  they  are  always  very  thin  and  very  old. 
The  youngest  Stage  solicitor  we  ever  remember 
to  have  seen  looked  about  sixty  —  the  oldest, 
about  a  hundred  and  forty-five. 

By-the-bye,  it  is  never  very  safe  to  judge 
people's  ages,  on  the  stage,  by  their  personal  ap- 
pearance. We  have  known  old  ladies  who  looked 
seventy,  if  they  were  a  day,  turn  out  to  be  the 
mothers  of  boys  of  fourteen,  while  the  middle- 

59 


60  STAGE-LAND. 

aged  husband  of  the  young  wife  generally  gives 
one  the  idea  of  ninety. 

Again,  what  appears  at  first  sight  to  be  a  com- 
fortable looking  and  eminently  respectable  elderly 
lady  is  often  discovered  to  be,  in  reality,  a  giddy, 
girlish,  and  inexperienced  young  thing,  the  pride 
of  the  village  or  the  darling  of  the  regiment. 

So,  too,  an  exceptionally  stout  and  short-winded 
old  gentleman,  who  looks  as  if  he  had  been  living 
too  well,  and  taking  too  little  exercise  for  the  last 
forty-five  years,  is  not  the  heavy  father,  as  you 
might  imagine  if  you  judged  from  mere  external 
evidence,  but.  a  wild,  reckless  boy. 

You  would  not  think  so  to  look  at  him,  but  his 
only  faults  are  that  he  is  so  young  and  light- 
headed. There  is  good  in  him,  however,  and  he 
will  no  doubt  be  steady  enough,  when  he  grows 
up.  All  the  young  men  of  the  neighborhood 
worship  him,  and  the  girls  love  him. 

"Here  he  comes,"  they  say,  "dear,  dear  old 
Jack — Jack,  the  darling  boy — the  headstrong 
youth — Jack,  the  leader  of  our  juvenile  sports, 
Jack!  whose  childish  innocence  wins  all  hearts. 
Three  cheers  for  dancing,  bright-eyed  Jack !" 

On  the  other  hand,  ladies  with  the  complexion 
of  eighteen,  are,  you  learn  as  the  story  progresses, 


THE  LAWYER.  61 

quite  elderly  women,  the  mothers  of  middle-aged 
heroes. 

The  experienced  observer  of  Stage-land  never 
jumps  to  conclusions  from  what  he  sees.  He 
waits  till  he  is  told  things. 

The  Stage  lawyer  never  has  any  office  of  his 
own.  He  transacts  all  his  business  at  his  clients' 
houses.  He  will  travel  hundreds  of  miles  to  tell 
them  the  most  trivial  piece  of  legal  information. 

It  never  occurs  to  him  how  much  simpler  it 
would  be  to  write  a  letter.  The  item  for  "travel- 
ing expenses,"  in  his  bill  of  costs,  must  be  some- 
thing enormous. 

There  are  two  moments  in  the  course  of  his 
clients'  career,  that  the  Stage  lawyer  particularly 
enjoys.  The  first  is  when  the  client  comes  unex- 
pectedly into  a  fortune ;  the  second,  when  he  un- 
expectedly loses  it. 

In  the  former  case,  upon  learning  the  good 
news,  the  Stage  lawyer  at  once  leaves  his  busi- 
ness, and  hurries  off  to  the  other  end  of  the  king- 
dom to  bear  the  glad  tidings.  He  arrives  at  the 
humble  domicile  of  the  beneficiary  in  question, 
sends  up  his  card,  and  is  ushered  into  the  front 
parlor.  He  enters  mysteriously,  and  sits  left, 
client  sits  right.  An  ordinary,  common  lawyer 


62 


STAGE-LAND. 


would  come  to  the  point  at  once,  state  the  matter 
in  a  plan  btisiness-like  way,  and  trust  that  he 
might  have  the  pleasure  of  representing,  etc.,  etc. ; 
but  such  simple  methods  are  not  those  of  the 
Stage  lawyer.  He  looks  at  the  client,  and  says: 

"You  had  a  father." 

The  client  starts.     How  on  earth  did  this  calm, 


YOU  HAD  A  FATHER! 


thin,  keen-eyed  old  man  in  black  know  that  he 
had  a  father?  He  shuffles  and  stammers,  but  the 
quiet,  impenetrable  lawyer  fixes  his  cold,  glassy 
eye  on  him,  and  he  is  helpless.  Subterfuge,  he 
feels,  is  useless,  and  amazed,  bewildered,  at  the 
knowledge  of  his  most  private  affairs,  possessed 
by  his  strange  visitant,  he  admits  the  fact :  he  had 
a  father. 


THE  LAWYER.  63 

The  lawyer  smiles  with  a  quiet  smile  of  triumph, 
and  scratches  his  chin.  "You  had  a  mother,  too, 
if  I  am  informed  correctly,"  he  continues. 

It  is  idle  attempting  to  escape  this  man's  super- 
natural acuteness,  and  the  client  owns  up  to  hav- 
ing had  a  mother  also. 

From  this,  the  lawyer  goes  on  to  communicate 
to  the  client,  as  a  great  secret,  the  whole  of  his 
(the  client's)  history  from  his  cradle  upwards,  and 
also  the  history  of  his  nearer  relatives,  and  in  less 
than  half-an-hour  from  the  old  man's  entrance,  or, 
say,  forty  minutes,  at  the  outside,  the  client 
almost  knows  what  the  business  is  about. 

On  the  other  occasion,  when  the  client  has  lost 
his  fortune,  the  Stage  lawyer  is  even  still  happier. 
He  comes  down  himself  to  tell  the  misfortune  (he 
would  not  miss  the  job  for  worlds),  and  he  takes 
care  to  choose  the  most  unpropitious  moment 
possible  for  breaking  the  news.  On  the  eldest 
daughter's  birthday,  when  there  "s  a  big  party  on, 
is  his  favorite  time.  He  comes  in  about  mid- 
night, and  tells  them  just  as  they  are  going  down 
to  supper. 

He  has  no  idea  of  business  hours,  has  the  Stage 
lawyer — to  make  the  thing  as  unpleasant  as  possi- 
ble seems  to  be  his  only  anxiety. 


64  STAGE-LAND. 

If  he  cannot  work  it  for  a  birthday,  then  he 
waits  till  there's  a  wedding  on,  and  gets  up  early 
in  the  morning  on  purpose  to  run  down  and  spoil 
the  show.  To  enter  among  a  crowd  of  happy, 
joyous  fellow-creatures,  and  leave  them  utterly 
crushed  and  miserable,  is  the  Stage  lawyer's  hobby. 

The  Stage  lawyer  is  a  very  talkative  gentleman. 
He  regards  the  telling  of  his  client's  most  private 
affairs  to  every  stranger  that  he  meets,  as  part  of 
his  professional  duties.  A  good  gossip,  with  a 
few  chance  acquaintances,  about  the  family 
secrets  of  his  employers,  is  food  and  drink  for 
the  Stage  lawyer. 

They  all  go  about  telling  their  own  and  their 
friends'  secrets,  to  perfect  strangers,  on  the  stage. 
Whenever  two  people  have  five  minutes  to  spare, 
on  the  stage,  they  tell  each  other  the  story  of 
their  lives.  "Sit  down,  and  I  will  tell  you  the 
story  of  my  life,"  is  the  stage  equivalent  for  the 
"Come  and  have  a  drink,"  of  the  outside  world. 

The  good  Stage  lawyer  has  generally  nursed  the 
heroine  on  his  knee,  when  a  baby  (when  she  was 
a  baby,  we  mean) — when  she  was  only  so  high. 
It  seems  to  have  been  a  part  of  his  professional 
duties.  The  good  Stage  lawyer  also  kisses  all 
the  pretty  girls  in  the  play,  and  is  expected  to 


THE  LAWYER.  65 

chuck  the  housemaid  under  the  chin.     It  is  good 
to'  be  a  good  Stage  lawyer. 

The  good  Stage  lawyer  also  wipes  away  a  tear 
when  sad  things  happen ;  and  he  turns  away  to  do 
this,  and  blows  his  nose,  and  says  he  thinks  he 


IS  EXPECTED   TO   CHUCK   THB   HOUSEMAID    OCDER  THE  CHIN. 

has  a  fly  in  his  eye.  This  touching  trait  in  his 
character  is  always  held  in  great  esteem  by  the 
audience,  and  is  much  applauded. 

The  good  Stage  lawyer  is  never,  by  any  chance, 
a  married  man.     (Few  good  men  are,  so  we  gather 


66 


STAGE-LAND. 


from  our  married  lady  friends.)  He  loved,  in 
early  life,  the  heroine's  mother.  That  "sainted 
woman"  (tear  and  nose  business)  died,  and  is  now 
among  the  angels — the  gentleman  who  did  marry 
her,  by-the-bye,  is  not  quite  so  sure  about  this 
latter  point,  but  the  lawyer  is  fixed  on  the  idea. 


THEY   MAKE   THE    DULL   OLD   PLACE   QUITE    LIVELY    FOR    HIM. 

In  stage  literature  of  a  frivolous  nature,  the 
lawyer  is  a  very  different  individual.  In  comedy, 
he  is  young,  he  possesses  chambers,  and  he  is 
married,  (there  is  no  doubt  about  this  latter  fact); 
and  his  wife  and  his  mother-in-law  spend  most  of 


THE  LAWYER.  67 

the  day  in  his  office,  and  make  the  dull  old  place 
quite  lively  for  him. 

He  only  has  one  client.  She  is  a  nice  lady,  and 
affable,  but  her  antecedents  are  doubtful,  and  she 
seems  to  be  no  better  than  she  ought  to  be — 
possibly  worse.  But  anyhow,  she  is  the  sole  busi- 
ness that  the  poor  fellow  has — is,  in  fact,  his  only 
source  of  income,  and  might,  one  would  think, 
under  such  circumstances,  be  accorded  a  welcome 
by  his  family.  But  his  wife  and  his  mother-in- 
law,  on  the  contrary,  take  a  violent  dislike  to  her; 
and  the  lawyer  has  to  put  her  in  the  coal  scuttle, 
or  lock  her  up  in  the  safe,  whenever  he  hears 
either  of  these  female  relatives  of  his  coming  up 
the  stairs. 

We  should  not  care  to  be  the  client  of  a  farci- 
cal comedy  Stage  lawyer.  Legal  transactions  are 
trying  to  the  nerves  under  the  most  favorable 
circumstances ;  conducted  by  a  farcical  Stage  law- 
yer, the  business  would  be  too  exciting  for  us. 


Hbventuress. 

SITS  on  a  table  and 
smokes  a  cigarette.  A 
cigarette  on  the  stage  is 
always  the  badge  of  infamy. 
In  real  life  the  cigarette  is 
usually  the  hall-mark  of  the 
particularly  mild  and  harm- 
less individual.  It  is  the 
dissipation  of  the  Y.M.C.A. ;  the  innocent  joy 
of  the  pure-hearted  boy,  long  ere  the  demoraliz- 
ing influence  of  our  vaunted  civilization  has 
dragged  him  down  into  the  depths  of  the  short 
clay. 

But  behind  the  cigarette,  on  the  stage,  lurks 
ever  black-hearted  villainy  and  abandoned  woman- 
hood. 

The  adventuress  is  generally  of  foreign  extrac- 
tion. They  do  not  make  bad  women  in  England, 
the  article  is  entirely  of  continental  manufacture, 
and  has  to  be  imported. 

71 


72  STAGE-LAND. 

She  speaks  English  with  a  charming  little 
French  accent,  and  she  makes  up  for  this  by 
speaking  French  with  a  good  sound  English  one. 

She  seems  a  smart  business  woman,  and  she 
would  probably  get  on  very  well  if  it  were  not  for 
her  friends  and  relations.  Friends  and  relations 
are  a  trying  class  of  people,  even  in  real  life,  as 
we  all  know,  but  the  friends  and  relations  of  the 
Stage  adventuress  are  a  particularly  irritating  lot. 
They  never  leave  her,  never  does  she  get  a  day  or 
an  hour  off  from  them.  Wherever  she  goes,  there 
the  whole  tribe  goes  with  her. 

They  all  go  with  her  in  a  body  when  she  calls  on 
her  young  man,  and  it  is  as  much  as  she  can  do  to 
persuade  them  to  go  into  the  next  room,  even  for 
five  minutes,  and  give  her  a  chance.  When  she  is 
married  they  come  and  live  with  her. 

They  know  her  dreadful  secret,  and  it  keeps 
them  in  comfort  for  years.  Knowing  somebody's 
secret  seems,  on  the  stage,  to  be  one  of  the  most 
profitable  and  least  exhausting  professions  going. 

She  is  fond  of  married  life,  is  the  adventuress, 
and  she  goes  in  for  it  pretty  extensively.  She 
has  husbands  all  over  the  globe,  most  of  them  in 
prison,  but  they  escape  and  turn  up  in  the  last 
act,  and  spoil  all  the  poor  girl's  plans,  That  is  so 


THE  ADVENTURESS. 


73 


like  husbands — no  consideration,  no  thought  for 
their  poor  wives. 

They  are  not  a  prepossessing  lot  either,  those 
early  husbands  of  hers.  What  she  could  have 
seen  in  them  to  induce  her  to  marry  them  is 
indeed  a  mystery. 

The  adventuress  dresses  magnificently.     Where 


THOSE  EARLY  HUSBANDS  OF  HERS. 


she  gets  the  money  from  we  never  could  under- 
stand, for  she  and  her  companions  are  always 
more  or  less  complaining  of  being  "stone  broke." 
Dressmakers  must  be  a  trusting  people  where  she 
comes  from. 


74  STAGE-LAND. 

The  adventuress  is  like  the  proverbial  cat  as  re- 
gards the  number  of  lives  she  is  possessed  of.  You 
never  know  when  she  is  really  dead.  Most  people 
like  to  die  once  and  have  done  with  it,  but  the 
adventuress,  after  once  or  twice  trying  to,  seems  to 
get  quite  to  like  it,  and  goes  on  giving  way  to  it, 
and  then  it  grows  upon  her  until  she  can't  help 
herself,  and  it  becomes  a  sort  of  craving  with  her. 

This  habit  of  hers  is,  however,  a  very  trying  one 
for  her  friends  and  husbands,  it  makes  things  so 
uncertain.  Something  ought  to  be  done  to  break 
her  of  it.  Her  husbands,  on  hearing  that  she  is 
dead,  go  into  raptures,  and  rush  off  and  marry 
other  people,  and  then,  just  as  they  are  starting 
off  on  their  new  honeymoon,  up  she  crops  again, 
as  fresh  as  paint.  It  is  really  most  annoying. 

For  ourselves,  were  we  the  husband  of  a  Stage 
adventuress,  we  should  never,  after  what  we  have 
seen  of  the  species,  feel  quite  justified  in  believing 
her  to  be  dead,  unless  we  had  killed  and  buried 
her  ourselves ;  and  even  then  we  should  be  more 
easy  in  our  minds  if  we  could  arrange  to  sit  on 
her  grave  for  a  week  or  so  afterwards.  These 
women  are  so  artful ! 

But  it  is  not  only  the  adventuress  who  will  per- 
sist in  coming  to  life  again,  every  time  she  is 


THE  ADVENTURESS.  75 

slaughtered.  They  all  do  it  on  the  stage.  They 
are  all  so  unreliable  in  this  respect.  It  must  be 
most  disheartening  to  the  murderers. 

And  then  again,  it  is  something  extraordinary, 
when  you  come  to  think  of  it,  what  a  tremendous 
amount  of  killing  some  of  them  can  stand,  and 
still  come  up  smiling  in  the  next  act,  not  a  penny 
the  worse  for  it.  They  get  stabbed,  and  shot, 
and  thrown  over  precipices  thousands  of  feet  high, 
and,  bless  you,  it  does  them  good — it  is  like  a 
tonic  to  them. 

As  for  the  young  man  that  is  coming  home  to 
see  his  girl,  you  simply  cant  kill  him.  Achilles 
was  a  summer  rose  compared  with  him.  Nature 
and  mankind  have  not  sufficient  materials  in  hand, 
as  yet,  to  kill  that  man.  Science  has  but  the 
strength  of  a  puling  babe  against  his  invulnera- 
bility. You  can  waste  your  time  on  earthquakes 
and  shipwrecks,  volcanic  eruptions,  floods,  explo- 
sions, railway  accidents,  and  such  like  sort  of 
things,  if  you  are  foolish  enough  to  do  so;  but  it 
is  no  good  your  imagining  that  anything  of  the 
kind  can  hurt  him,  because  it  can't. 

There  will  be  thousands  of  people  killed,  thou- 
sands in  each  instance,  but  one  human  being  will 
always  escape,  and  that  one  human  being  will  be 


7  6  STAGE-LAND. 

the  Stage  young  man  who  is  coming  home  to  see 
his  girl. 

He  is  for  ever  being  reported  as  dead,  but  it 
always  turns  out  to  be  another  fellow  who  was 
like  him,  or  who  had  on  his  (the  young  man's)  hat. 
He  is  bound  to  be  out  of  it,  whoever  else  may 
be  in. 

"If  I  had  been  at  my  post  that  day,"  he  explains 
to  his  sobbing  mother,  "I  should  have  been  blown 
up,  but  the  Providence  that  watches  over  good 
men  had  ordained  that  I  should  be  lying  blind- 
drunk  in  Blogg's  saloon  at  the  time  the  explosion 
took  place,  and  so  the  other  engineer,  who  had 
been  doing  my  work  when  it  was  his  turn  to  be 
off,  was  killed  along  with  the  whole  of  the  crew." 

"Ah,  thank  Heaven,  thank  Heaven  for  that !" 
ejaculates  the  pious  old  lady,  and  the  comic  man 
is  so  overcome  with  devout  joy  that  he  has  to 
relieve  his  overstrained  heart  by  drawing  his  young 
woman  on  one  side,  and  grossly  insulting  her. 

All  attempts  to  kill  this  young  man  ought  really 
to  be  given  up  now.  The  job  has  been  tried  over 
and  over  again  by  villains  and  bad  people  of  all 
kinds,  but  no  one  has  ever  succeeded.  There  has 
been  an  amount  of  energy  and  ingenuity  ex- 
pended in  seeking  to  lay  up  that  one  man  which, 


THE  ADVENTURESS.  77 

properly  utilized,  might  have  finished  off  ten  mil- 
lion ordinary  mortals.  It  is  sad  to  think  of  so 
much  wasted  effort. 

He,  the  young  man,  coming  home  to  see  his 
girl,  need  never  take  an  insurance  ticket,  or  even 
buy  a  Tit  Bits.  It  would  be  needless  expenditure 
in  his  case. 

On  the  other  hand,  and  to  make  matters  equal, 
as  it  were,  there  are  some  Stage  people  so  delicate 
that  it  is  next  door  to  impossible  to  keep  them 
alive. 

The  inconvenient  husband  is  a  most  pathetic 
example  of  this.  Medical  science  is  powerless  to 
save  that  man  when  the  last  act  comes  round ; 
indeed,  we  doubt  whether  medical  science,  in  its 
present  state  of  development,  could  even  tell  what 
is  the  matter  with  him  or  why  he  dies  at  all.  He 
looks  healthy  and  robust  enough,  and  nobody 
touches  him,  yet  down  he  drops  without  a  word  of 
warning,  stone-dead,  in  the  middle  of  the  floor — 
he  always  dies  in  the  middle  of  the  floor.  Some 
folks  like  to  die  in  bed,  but  Stage  people  don't. 
They  like  to  die  on  the  floor.  We  all  have  our 
different  tastes. 

The  adventuress  herself  is  another  person  who 
dies  with  remarkable  ease.  We  suppose,  in  her 


STAGE-LAND. 


case,  it  is  being  so  used  to  it  that  makes  her  so 
quick  and  clever  at  it.  There  is  no  lingering  ill- 
ness and  doctor's  bills,  and  upsetting  of  the  whole 


household  arrangements,  about  her  method.     One 
walk  round  the  stage  and  the  thing  is  done. 
All  bad  characters   die  quickly   on  the  stage. 


Good  characters  take  a  long  time  over  it,  and  have 
a  sofa  down  in  the  drawing-room  to  do  it  on,  and 
have  sobbing  relatives  and  good  old  doctors  fool- 


THE  ADVENTURESS. 


79 


ing  around  them,  and  can  smile  and  forgive  every- 
body. Bad  Stage  characters  have  to  do  the  whole 
job,  dying,  speech  and  all,  in  about  ten  seconds, 


\ 


and  do  it  with  all  their  clothes  on  into  the  bar- 
gain, which  must  make  it  most  uncomfortable. 

It  is  repentance  that  kills  off  the  bad  people 
in  plays.  They  always  repent,  and  the  moment 
they  repent  they  die.  Repentance,  on  the  stage, 
seems  to  be  one  of  the  most  dangerous  things  a 
man  can  be  taken  with.  Our  advice  to  Stage 
wicked  people  would  undoubtedly  be,  "Never 
repent.  If  you  value  your  life,  don't  repent.  It 
always  means  sudden  death!" 

To  return   to  our   adventuress,  she  is   by  no 


means  a  bad  woman.  There  is  much  good  in  her. 
This  is  more  than  proved  by  the  fact  that  she 
learns  to  love  the  hero  before  she  dies ;  for  no  one 


o  STAGE-LAND. 

but  a  really  good  woman,  capable  of  extraordinary 
patience  and  gentleness,  could  ever,  we  are  con- 
vinced, grow  to  feel  any  other  sentiment  for  that 
irritating  ass  than  a  desire  to  throw  bricks  at 
him. 

The  Stage  adventuress  would  be  a  much  better 
woman,  too,  if  it  were  not  for  the  heroine.  The 
adventuress  makes  the  most  complete  arrange- 
ments for  being  noble  and  self-sacrificing,  that  is 
for  going  away  and  never  coming  back,  and  is  just 
about  to  carry  them  out,  when  the  heroine,  who 
has  a  perfect  genius  for  being  in  the  wrong  place 
at  the  right  time,  comes  in  and  spoils  it  all.  No 
Stage  adventuress  can  be  good  while  the  heroine 
is  about.  The  sight  of  the  heroine  rouses  every 
bad  feeling  in  her  breast. 

We  can  sympathize  with  her  in  this  respect. 
The  heroine  often  affects  ourselves  in  precisely 
the  same  way. 

There  is  a  good  deal  to  be  said  in  favor  of  the 
adventuress.  True,  she  possesses  rather  too  much 
sarcasm  and  repartee  to  make  things  quite  agreea- 
ble round  the  domestic  hearth,  and,  when  she  has 
got  all  her  clothes  on,  there  is  not  much  room  left 
in  the  place  for  anybody  else ;  but,  taken  on  the 
whole,  she  is  decidedly  attractive.  She  has  grit 


THE  ADVENTURESS. 


8l 


and  go  in  her.  She  is  alive.  She  can  do  some- 
thing to  help  herself  besides  calling  for  "George." 
She  has  not  got  a  Stage  child — if  she  ever  had 
one,  she  has  left  it  on  somebody  else's  doorstep, 
which,  presuming  there  was  no  water  handy  to 
drown  it  in,  seems  to  be  about  the  most  sensible 


SHE    IS  THE   ONLY   PERSON    IN  THE    PIECE   WHO   CAN 
SIT  ON   THE   COMIC   MAN. 


thing  she  could  have  done  with  it.     She  is  not 
oppressively  good. 

She  never  wants  to  be  "unhanded,"  or  "let  to 
pass."  She  is  not  always  being  shocked  or 
insulted  by  people  telling  her  that  they  love  her; 
she  does  not  seem  to  mind  it  if  they  do.  She  is 


82  STAGE-LAND. 

not  always  fainting,  and  crying,  and  sobbing,  and 
wailing,  and  moaning,  like  the  good  people  in  the 
play  are. 

Oh,  they  do  have  an  unhappy  time  of  it — the 
good  people  in  plays !  Then  she  is  the  only  per- 
son in  the  piece  who  can  sit  on  the  comic  man. 

We  sometimes  think  it  would  be  a  fortunate 
thing — for  him — if  they  allowed  her  to  marry  and 
settle  down  quietly  with  the  hero,  She  might 
make  a  man  of  him,  in  time. 


Oervanl 
Girl 


Servant  (Birl 


kARE  two  types  of  servant 
girl  to  be  met  with   on 
the    stage.     This    is    an 
unusual   allowance    for   one  pro- 
fession. 

There  is  the  lodging-house  slavey. 
She  has  a  good  heart,  and  a  smutty  face,  and 
is  always  dressed  according  to  the  latest  fashion 
in  scarecrows. 

Her  leading  occupation  is  the  cleaning  of  boots. 
She  cleans  boots  all  over  the  house,  at  all  hours 
of  the  day.  She  comes  and  sits  down  on  the 
hero's  breakfast  table,  and  cleans  them  over  the 
poor  fellow's  food.  She  comes  into  the  drawing- 
room  cleaning  boots. 

She  has  her  own  method  of  cleaning  them,  too. 
She  rubs  off  the  mud,  puts  on  the  blacking,  and 
polishes  up  all  with  the  same  brush.  They  take 
an  enormous  amount  of  polishing,  she  seems  to  do 

85 


86  STAGE-LAND. 

nothing  else  all  day  long  but  walk  about  shining 
one  boot,  and  she  breathes  on  it  and  rubs  it  till 
you  wonder  there  is  any  leather  left,  yet  it  never 
seems  to  get  any  brighter,  nor,  indeed,  can  you 
expect  it  to,  for  when  you  look  closely  you  see  it 
is  a  patent  leather  boot  that  she  has  been  throwing 
herself  away  upon  all  this  time. 

Somebody  has  been  having  a  lark  with  the  poor 
girl. 

The  lodging-house  slavey  brushes  her  hair  with 
the  boot  brush,  and  blacks  the  end  of  her  nose 
with  it. 

We  were  acquainted  with  a  lodging-house  slavey 
once — a  real  one,  we  mean.  She  was  the  hand- 
maiden at  a  house  in  Bloomsbury,  where  we  once 
hung  out.  She  was  untidy  in  her  dress,  it  is 
true,  but  she  had  not  quite  that  castaway  and 
gone-to-sleep-in-a-dustbin  appearance  that  we, 
an  earnest  student  of  the  drama,  felt  she  ought 
to  present,  and  we  questioned  her  one  day  on  the 
subject. 

"How  is  it,  Sophronia,"  we  said,  "that  you  dis- 
tantly resemble  a  human  being  instead  of  giving 
one  the  idea  of  an  animated  rag-shop?  Don't  you 
ever  polish  your  nose  with  the  blacking  brush,  or 
rub  coal  into  your  head,  or  wash  your  face  in 


THE   SERVANT    GIRL.  87 

treacle,  or  put  skewers  into  your  hair,  or  anything 
of  that  sort,  like  they  do  on  the  stage?" 

She  said,  "Lord  love  you,  what  should  I  want 
to  go  and  be  a  bally  idiot  like  that  for?" 

And  we  have  not  liked  to  put  the  question  else- 
where since  then. 

The  other  type  of  servant  girl  on  the  stage — 
the  villa  servant  girl — is  a  very  different  person- 
age. She  is  a  fetching  little  thing,  and  dresses 
bewitchingly,  and  is  always  clean.  Her  duties  are 
to  dust  the  legs  of  the  chairs  in  the  drawing-room. 
That  is  the  only  work  she  ever  has  to  do,  but  it 
must  be  confessed  she  does  that  thoroughly.  She 
never  comes  into  the  room  without  dusting  the 
legs  of  these  chairs,  and  she  dusts  them  again 
before  she  goes  out. 

If  anything  ought  to  be  free  from  dust  in  a 
stage  house,  it  should  be  the  legs  of  the  drawing- 
room  chairs. 

She  is  going  to  marry  the  man-servant,  is  the 
Stage  servant  girl,  as  soon  as  they  have  saved  up 
sufficient  out  of  their  wages  to  buy  an  hotel. 
They  think  they  will  like  to  keep  an  hotel.  They 
don't  understand  a  bit  about  the  business,  which 
we  believe  is  a  complicated  one,  but  this  does  not 
trouble  them  in  the  least. 


88 


STAGE-LAND. 


They  quarrel  a  good  deal  over  their  love-mak- 
ing, do  the  Stage  servant  girl  and  her  young  man, 
and  they  always  come  into  the  drawing-room  to 
do  it.  They  have  got  the  kitchen,  and  there  is 
the  garden  (with  a  fountain  and  mountains  in  the 
background — you  can  see  it  through  the  window), 


SHE   IS  GOING  TO   MARRY  THE   MANSERVANT. 

but  no !  no  place  in  or  about  the  house  is  good 
enough  for  them  to  quarrel  in  except  the  drawing- 
room.  They  quarrel  there  so  vigorously  that  it 
even  interferes  with  the  dusting  of  the  chair  legs. 
She  ought  not  to  be  long  in  saving  up  sufficient 


THE   SERVANT    GIRL.  89 

to  marry  on,  for  the  generosity  of  people  on  the 
stage,  to  the  servants  there,  makes  one  seriously 
consider  the  advisability  of  ignoring  the  unre- 
munerative  professions  of  ordinary  life,  and  start- 
ing a  new  and  more  promising  career  as  a  Stage 
servant. 

No  one  ever  dreams  of  tipping  the  Stage  ser- 
vant with  less  than  a  sovereign  when  they  ask  her 
if  her  mistress  is  at  home,  or  give  her  a  letter  to 
post,  and  there  is  quite  a  rush  at  the  end  of  the 
piece  to  stuff  five-pound  notes  into  her  hand. 
The  good  old  man  gives  her  ten. 

The  Stage  servant  is  very  impudent  to  her  mis- 
tress, and  the  master — he  falls  in  love  with  her, 
and  it  does  upset  the  house  so. 

Sometimes  the  servant  girl  is  good  and  faithful, 
and  then  she  is  Irish.  All  good  servant  girls  on 
the  Stage  are  Irish. 

All  the  male  visitors  are  expected  to  kiss  the 
Stage  servant  girl  when  they  come  into  the  house, 
and  to  dig  her  in  the  ribs,  and  to  say,  "Do  you 
know,  Jane,  I  think  you're  an  uncommonly  nice 
girl  —  click."  They  always  say  this,  and  she 
likes  it. 

Many  years  ago,  when  we  were  young,  we 
thought  we  would  see  if  things  were  the  same  off 


9o 


STAGE-LAND. 


the  stage,  and  the  next  time  we  called  at  a  certain 
friend's  house,  we  tried  this  business  on. 

She  wasn't  quite  so  dazzlingly  beautiful  as  they 
are  on  the  stage,  but  we  passed  that.  She  showed 
us  up  into  the  drawing-room,  and  then  said  she 
would  go  and  tell  her  mistress  we  were  there. 

We  felt  this  was  the  time  to 
begin.  We  skipped  between 
her  and  the  door.  We  held 
our  hat  in  front  of  us,  and 
cocked  our  head  on  one  side, 
and  said,  "Don't  go!  don't 
go!" 

The  girl  seemed  alarmed. 
We  began  to  get  a  little  nerv- 
ous ourselves,  but  we  had  be- 
gun it,  and  we  meant  to  go 
through  with  it. 

We  said,  "Do  you  know, 
Jane,"  (her  name  wasn't  Jane, 
but  that  wasn't  our  fault),  "do  you  know,  Jane, 
I  think  you're  an  uncommonly  nice  girl,"  and 
we  said  "click,"  and  dug  her  in  the  ribs  with  our 
elbow,  and  then  chucked  her  under  the  chin. 
The  whole  thing  seemed  to  fall  flat.  There 
was  nobody  there  to  laugh  or  applaud.  We 


THEN  SHE   IS   IRISH. 


THE  SERVANT   GIRL.  91 

wished  we  hadn't  done  it.  It  seemed  stupid, 
when  you  came  to  think  of  it.  We  began  to  feel 
frightened.  The  business  wasn't  going  as  we 
expected ;  but  we  screwed  up  our  courage,  and 
went  on. 

We  put  on  the  customary  expression  of  comic 


DO   YOU    KNOW,  JANE,    I   THINK  YOU  KK   AN   UNCOMMONLY 
NICE   GIRL — "  CLICK.'' 

imbecility,  and  beckoned  the  girl  to  us.     We  have 
never  seen  this  fail  on  the  stage. 

But   this  girl  seemed    made  wrong.     She   got 
behind  the  sofa,  and  screamed  "Help!" 


92  STAGE-LAND, 

We  have  never  known  them  to  do  this  on  the 
stage,  and  it  threw  us  out  in  our  plans.  We  did 
not  know  exactly  what  to  do.  We  regretted  that 
we  had  ever  begun  this  job,  and  heartily  wished 
ourselves  out  of  it.  But  it  appeared  foolish  to 
pause  then,  when  we  were  more  than  half  way 
through,  and  we  made  a  rush  to  get  it  over. 

We  chivied  the  girl  round  the  sofa,  and  caught 
her  near  the  door,  and  kissed  her.  She  scratched 
our  face,  yelled  police,  murder,  and  fire,  and  fled 
from  the  room. 

Our  friend  came  in  almost  immediately.  He  said: 
"I  say,  J.,  old  man,  are  you  drunk?" 
We  told  him  no,  that  we  were  only  a  student  of 
the  drama. 

His  wife  then  entered  in  a  towering  passion. 
She  didn't  ask  us  if  we  were  drunk.     She  said : 
"How  dare  you  come  here  in  this  state!" 
We  endeavored,  unsuccessfully,  to  induce  her 
to  believe  that  we  were  sober;  and  we  explained 
that  our  course  of  conduct  was  what  was  always 
pursued  on  the  stage. 

She  said  she  didn't  care  what  was  done  on  the 
stage,  it  wasn't  going  to  be  pursued  in  her 
house;  and  that  if  her  husband's  friends  couldn't 
behave  as  gentlemen  they  had  better  stop  away. 


THE   SERVANT   GIRL.  93 

A  few  more  chatty  remarks  were  exchanged, 
and  then  we  took  our  leave. 

The  following  morning  we  received  a  letter 
from  a  firm  of  solicitors  in  Lincoln's  Inn  with 
reference,  so  they  put  it,  to  the  brutal  and  unpro- 
voked assault  committed  by  us  on  the  previous 
afternoon  upon  the  person  of  their  client,  Miss 
Matilda  Hemmings.  The  letter  stated  that  we 
had  punched  Miss  Hemmings  in  the  side,  struck 
her  under  the  chin,  and,  afterwards,  seizing  her  as 
she  was  leaving  the  room,  proceeded  to  commit  a 
gross  assault,  into  the  particulars  of  which  it  was 
needless  for  them  to  enter  at  greater  length. 

It  added  that  if  we  were  prepared  to  render  an 
ample  written  apology,  and  to  pay  fifty  pounds 
compensation,  they  would  advise  their  client,  Miss 
Matilda  Hemmings,  to  allow  the  matter  to  drop, 
otherwise  criminal  proceedings  would  at  once  be 
commenced  against  us. 

We  took  the  letter  to  our  own  solicitors,  and 
explained  the  circumstances  to  them.  They  said 
it  seemed  to  be  a  very  sad  case,  but  advised  us  to 
pay  the  fifty  pounds,  and  we  borrowed  the  money, 
and  did  so. 

Since  then  we  have  lost  faith,  somehow,  in  the 
British  drama  as  a  guide  to  the  conduct  of  life. 


© 


Cbe  Cbilb. 


I 


TIS  nice  and  quiet  and  it 
talks  pretty. 
We  have  come  across 
real  infants,  now  and  then, 
in  the  course  of  visits 
to  married  friends;  they 
have  been  brought  to  us 
from  outlying  parts  of  the 
house,  and  introduced  to 

us  for  our  edification ;  and  we  have  found  them 
gritty  and  sticky.  Their  boots  have  usually  been 
muddy,  and  they  have  \\iped  them  up  against 
our  new  trousers.  And  their  hair  has  suggested 
the  idea  that  they  have  been  standing  on  their 
heads  in  the  dust-bin. 

And  they  have  talked  to  us — but  not  pretty, 
not  at  all — rather  rude  we  should  call  it. 

But  the  Stage  child  is  very  different.  It  is 
clean  and  tidy.  You  can  touch  it  anywhere  and 
nothing  comes  off.  Its  face  glows  with  soap  and 

97 


98  STAGE-LAND. 

water.  From  the  appearance  of  its  hands  it  is 
evident  that  mud  pies  and  tar  are  joys  unknown 
to  it.  As  for  its  hair,  there  is  something  uncanny 
about  its  smoothness  and  respectability.  Even 
its  boot  laces  are  done  up. 

We  have  never  seen  anything  like  the  Stage 
child,  outside  a  theater,  excepting  once — that  was 
on  the  pavement  in  front  of  a  tailor's  shop  in 
Tottenham  Court  Road.  He  stood  on  a  bit  of 
round  wood,  and  it  was  fifteen  and  nine,  his 
style. 

We  thought,  in  our  ignorance,  prior  to  this, 
that  there  could  not  be  anything  in  the  world  like 
the  Stage  child,  but,  you  see  we  were  mistaken. 
The  Stage  child  is  affectionate  to  its  parents,  and 
its  nurse;  and  is  respectful  in  its  demeanor 
towards  those  whom  Providence  has  placed  in 
authority  over  it ;  and  so  far,  it  is  certainly  much 
to  be  preferred  to  the  real  article.  It  speaks  of  its 
male  and  female  progenitors  as  "dear,  dear  papa," 
and  "dear,  dear  mamma,"  and  it  refers  to  its  nurse 
as  "darling  nursey."  We  are  connected  with 
a  youthful  child,  ourselves  —  a  real  one  —  a 
nephew.  He  alludes  to  his  father  (when  his  father 
is  not  present)  as  "the  old  man";  and  always  calls 
the  nurse  "old  nutcrackers."  Why  cannot  they 


THE   CHILD.  99 

make  real  children  who  say  "dear,  dear  mamma," 
and  "dear,  dear  papa." 

The  Stage  child  is  much  superior  to  the  live 
infant,  in  every  way.  The  Stage  child  does  not 
go  rampaging  about  a  house  and  screeching  and 
yelling,  till  nobody  knows  whether  they  are  on 
their  head  or  their  heels. 

A  Stage  child  does  not  get  up  at  five  o'clock  in 
the  morning  to  practice  playing  on  a  penny  whis- 
tle. A  Stage  child  never  wants  a  bicycle,  and 
drives  you  mad  about  it.  A  Stage  child  does  not 
ask  twenty  complicated  questions  a  minute  about 
things  that  you  don't  understand,  and  then  wind 
up  by  asking  why  you  don't  seem  to  know  any- 
thing, and  why  wouldn't  anybody  teach  you  any- 
thing when  you  were  a  little  boy. 

The  Stage  child  does  not  wear  out  a  hole  in  the 
seat  of  its  knickerbockers,  and  have  to  have  a 
patch  let  in.  The  Stage  child  comes  down  stairs 
on  its  feet. 

The  Stage  child  never  brings  home  six  other 
children  to  play  at  horses  in  the  front  garden,  and 
then  wants  to  know  if  they  can  all  come  in  to 
tea. 

The  Stage  child  never  has  the  whooping  cough, 
and  the  measles,  and  every  other  disease  that  it 


100  STAGE-LAND. 

can  lay  its  hands  on,  and  be  laid  up  with  them  one 
after  the  other,  and  turn  the  house  upside  down. 

The  Stage  child's  department  in  the  scheme  of 
life  is  to  harrow  up  its  mother's  feelings  by  ill- 
timed  and  uncalled  for  questions  about  its  father. 

It  always  wants  to  know,  before  a  roomful  of 
people,  where  "dear  papa"  is,  and  why  he  has 
left  dear  mamma ;  when,  as  all  the  guests  know, 
the  poor  man  is  doing  his  two  years'  hard,  or 
waiting  to  be  hanged. 

It  makes  everybody  so  uncomfortable. 

It  is  always  harrowing  up  somebody — the  Stage 
child, — it  really  ought  not  to  be  left  about,  as  it 
is.  When  it  has  done  upsetting  its  mother,  it 
fishes  out  some  broken-hearted  maid,  who  has  just 
been  cruelly  severed  for  ever  from  her  lover,  and 
asks  her  in  a  high  falsetto  voice,  why  she  doesn't 
get  married,  and  prattles  to  her  about  love,  and 
domestic  bliss,  and  young  men,  and  any  other 
subject  it  can  think  of,  particularly  calculated  to 
lacerate  the  poor  girl's  heart,  until  her  brain  nearly 
gives  way. 

After  that,  it  runs  amuck,  up  and  down  the 
whole  play,  and  makes  everybody  sit  up,  all 
round.  It  asks  eminently  respectable  old  maids 
if  they  wouldn't  like  to  have  a  baby ;  and  it  wants 


THE   CHILD. 


101 


to  know  why  baldheaded  old  men  have  left  off 
wearing  hair,  and  why  other  old  gentlemen  have 
red  noses,  and  if  they  were  always  that  color. 

In  some  plays,  it  so  happens  that  the  less  said 
about  the  origin  and  source  of  the  Stage  child, 


WANTS  TO   KNOW  WHY    BALD-HEADED   OLD   MEN   HAVE 
LEFT   OFF    WEARING    HAIR. 


the  better;  and,  in  such  cases,  nothing  will  appear 
so  important  to  that  contrary  brat  as  to  know,  in 
the  middle  of  an  evening  party,  who  its  father 
was! 

Everybody  loves  the  Stage  child.     They  catch 


102  STAGE-LAND. 

it  up  in  their  bosoms  every  other  minute  and  weep 
over  it.     They  take  it  in  turns  to  do  this. 

Nobody — on  the  stage,  we  mean — ever  has 
enough  of  the  Stage  child.  Nobody  ever  tells 
the  Stage  child  to  "shut  up,"  or  to  "get  out  of 
this."  Nobody  ever  clumps  the  Stage  child  over 
the  head. 

When  the  real  child  goes  to  the  theatre  it  must 
notice  these  things,  and  wish  it  were  a  Stage 
child. 

The  Stage  child  is  much  admired  by  the  audi- 
ence. Its  pathos  makes  them  weep ;  its  tragedy 
thrills  them  ;  its  declamation,  as,  for  instance,  when 
it  takes  the  center  of  the  stage,  and  says  it  will 
kill  the  wicked  man,  and  the  police,  and  every- 
body who  hurts  its  mar,  stirs  them  like  a  trumpet 
note;  and  its  light  comedy  is  generally  held  to  be 
the  most  truly  humorous  thing  in  the  whole 
range  of  dramatic  art. 

But  there  are  some  people  so  strangely  consti- 
tuted that  they  do  not  appreciate  the  Stage  child  ; 
they  do  not  comprehend  its  uses;  they  do  not 
understand  its  beauties. 

We  should  not  be  angry  with  them.  We 
should  the  rather  pity  them. 

We  ourselves  had  a  friend  once  who  suffered 


THE    CHILD. 


103 


from  this  misfortune.  He  was  a  married  man,  and 
Providence  had  been  very  gracious,  very  good  to 
him :  he  had  been  blessed  with  eleven  children, 
and  they  were  all  growing  up  well  and  strong. 

The  "baby"  was  eleven   weeks    old,  and    then 
came  the  twins,  who  were  getting  on  for  fifteen 


SAYS  IT  WILL  KILL  THE   WICKED  MAN. 


months,  and  were  cutting  their  double  teeth  nicely. 
The  youngest  girl  was  three,  and  there  were  five 
boys  aged  seven,  eight,  nine,  ten,  and  twelve, 
respectively — good  enough  lads,  but — well  there, 
boys  will  be  boys,  you  know;  we  were  just  the 


104  STAGE-LAND. 

same  ourselves  when  we  were  young.  The  two 
eldest  were  both  very  pleasant  girls,  as  their 
mother  said,  the  only  pity  was  that  they  would 
quarrel  so  with  each  other. 

We  never  knew  a  healthier  set  of  boys  and  girls. 
They  were  so  full  of  energy  and  dash. 

Our  friend  was  very  much  out  of  sorts  one  even- 
ing when  we  called  on  him.  It  was  holiday  time, 
and  wet  weather.  He  had  been  at  home  all  day, 
and  so  had  all  the  children.  He  was  telling  his 
wife,  when  we  entered  the  room,  that  if  the  holi- 
days were  to  last  much  longer  and  those  twins 
did  not  hurry  up  and  get  their  teeth  quickly,  he 
should  have  to  go  away  and  join  the  County 
Council.  He  could  not  stand  the  racket. 

His  wife  said  she  could  not  see  what  he  had  to 
complain  of.  She  was  sure  better-hearted  chil- 
dren no  man  could  have. 

Our  friend  said  he  didn't  care  about  their  hearts. 

It  was  their  legs,  and  arms,  and  lungs  that  were 
driving  him  crazy. 

He  also  said  that  he  would  go  out  with  us  and 
get  away  from  it  for  a  bit,  or  he  should  go  mad. 

He  proposed  a  theater,  and  we  accordingly 
made  our  way  towards  the  Strand.  Our  friend, 
in  closing  the  door  behind  him,  said  he  could  not 


THE   CHILD.  105 

tell  us  what  a  relief  it  was  to  get  away  from  those 
children.  He  said  he  loved  children  very  much 
indeed,  but  that  it  was  a  mistake  to  have  too 
much  of  anything,  however  much  you  liked  it, 
and  that  he  had  come  to  the  conclusion  that 
twenty-two  hours  a  day  of  them  was  enough  for 
anyone. 

He  said  he  did  not  want  to  see  another  child 
or  hear  another  child  until  he  got  home.  He 
wanted  to  forget  that  there  were  such  things  as 
children  in  the  world. 

We  got  up  to  the  Strand  and  dropped  into  the 
first  theater  we  came  to.  The  curtain  was  up, 
and  on  the  stage  was  a  small  child  standing  in  its 
nightshirt  and  screaming  for  i's  mother. 

Our  friend  looked,  said  one  word  and  bolted, 
and  we  followed. 

We  went  a  little  further,  and  dropped  into 
another  theater.  There,  there  were  two  children 
on  the  stage.  Some  grown-up  people  were  stand- 
ing round  them  listening,  in  respectful  attitudes, 
while  the  children  talked.  They  appeared  to  be 
lecturing  about  something. 

Again  we  fled,  swearing,  and  made  our  way  to 
a  third  theater.  They  were  all  children  there. 
It  was  somebody  or  others  Children's  Company 


I  °6  STA  GE-LAND. 

performing  an  opera,  or  pantomime,  or  something 
of  that  sort. 

Our  friend  said  he  would  not  venture  in  an- 
other theater.  He  said  he  had  heard  there  were 
places  called  music  halls,  and  he  begged  us  to  take 
him  to  one  of  these,  and  not  to  tell  his  wife. 

We  enquired  of  a  policeman  and  found  that 
there  really  were  such  places,  and  we  took  him 
into  one. 

The  first  thing  we  saw  were  two  little  boys 
doing  tricks  on  a  horizontal  bar. 

Our  friend  was  about  to  repeat  his  customary 
programme  of  flying  and  cursing,  but  we  re- 
strained him.  We  assured  him  that  he  really 
would  see  a  grown-up  person  if  he  waited  a  bit, 
so  he  sat  out  the  boys  and  also  their  little  sister 
on  a  bicycle,  and  waited  for  the  next  item. 

It  turned  out  to  be  an  infant  phenomenon  who 
sang  and  danced  in  fourteen  different  costumes, 
and  we  once  more  fled. 

Our  friend  said  he  could  not  go  home  in  the 
state  he  was  then,  he  felt  sure  he  should  kill  the 
twins,  if  he  did.  He  pondered  for  a  while,  and 
then  he  thought  he  would  go  and  hear  some  mu- 
sic. He  said  he  thought  a  little  music  would 
soothe  and  ennoble  him — make  him  feel  more 


THE  CHILD.  107 

like  a  Christian  than  he  did  at  that  precise 
moment. 

We  were  near  St.  James's  Hall,  so  we  went  in 
there. 

The  hall  was  densely  crowded,  and  we  had 
great  difficulty  in  forcing  our  way  to  our  seats. 
We  reached  them  at  length,  and  then  turned  our 
eyes  towards  the  orchestra. 

"The  marvelous  boy  pianist — only  ten  years 
old !"  was  giving  a  recital. 

Then  our  friend  rose  and  said  he  thought  he 
would  give  it  up  and  go  home. 

We  asked  him  if  he  would  like  to  try  any  other 
place  of  amusement,  but  he  said,  "No."  He  said 
that,  when  you  came  to  think  of  it,  it  seemed  a 
waste  of  money  for  a  man  with  eleven  children  of 
his  own  to  go  about  to  places  of  entertainment 
nowadays. 


Comic  Xovers. 


THEY  are  funny! 
The  comic  lovers' 
mission  in  life  is  to 
serve  as  a  sort  of 
"relief"  to  the  mis- 
ery caused  the  au- 
dience by  the  other 
characters  in  the  play ;  and  all  that  is  wanted  now 
is  something  that  will  be  a  relief  to  the  comic 
lovers. 

They  have  nothing  to  do  with  the  play,  but 
they  come  on  immediately  after  anything  very  sad 
has  happened,  and  make  love.  This  is  why  we 
watch  sad  scenes  on  the  stage  with  such  patience. 
We  are  not  eager  for  them  to  be  got  over.  May 
be,  they  are  very  uninteresting  scenes,  as  well  as 
sad  ones,  and  they  make  us  yawn ;  but  we  have 
no  desire  to  see  them  hurried  through.  The 
longer  they  take,  the  better  pleased  we  are :  we 
in 


112  STAGE-LAND. 

know  that,  when  they  are  finished,  the  comic 
lovers  will  come  on. 

They  are  always  very  rude  to  one  another,  the 
comic  lovers.  Everybody  is  more  or  less  rude 
and  insulting  to  everybody  else,  on  the  stage; 
they  call  it  repartee,  there !  We  tried  the  effect 
of  a  little  Stage  "repartee,"  once,  upon  some 
people  in  real  life,  and  we  wished  we  hadn't,  after- 
wards. It  was  too  subtle  for  them.  They  sum- 
moned us  before  a  magistrate  for  "using  lan- 
guage calculated  to  cause  a  breach  of  the  peace." 
We  were  fined  two  pounds,  and  costs ! 

They  are  more  lenient  to  "wit  and  humor"  on 
the  stage,  and  know  how  to  encourage  the  art  of 
vituperation.  But  the  comic  lovers  carry  the 
practice  almost  to  excess.  They  are  more  than 
rude,  they  are  abusive.  They  insult  each  other 
from  morning  to  night.  What  their  married  life 
will  be  like,  we  shudder  to  think. 

In  the  various  slanging  matches  and  bullyrag- 
ging competitions,  which  form  their  courtship,  it 
is  always  the  maiden  that  is  most  successful. 
Against  her  merry  flow  of  invective,  and  her  girl- 
ish wealth  of  offensive  personalities,  the  insolence 
and  abuse  of  her  boyish  adorer  cannot  stand  for 
one  moment. 


THE   COMIC  LOVERS.  I 1 3 

To  give  an  idea  of  how  the  comic  lovers  woo, 
we,  perhaps,  cannot  do  better  than  subjoin  the 
following  brief  example : — 

Scene  :  Main  thoroughfare  in  populous  district 
of  London.     Time  :  Noon.     Not  a  soul  to  be 
seen  anywhere. 
Enter  comic  loveress  R.,  walking  in  the  middle 

of  t lie  road. 

Enter  comic  lover  L.,  also  walking  in  the  mid- 
dle of  the  road. 
They  neither  see  the  other  one,  until  they  bump 

against  each  other  in  the  center. 
He.  Why,  Jane !     Who'd  a'  thought  o'  meeting 
you  here !" 

She.  You  evidently  didn't — stoopid ! 
He.  Hulloa !  got  out  o'  bed  the  wrong  side  again. 
I  say,  Jane,  if  you  go  on  like  that,  you'll  never 
get  a  man  to  marry  you. 

She.  So  I  thought,  when  I  engaged  myself  to 
you. 

He.  Oh !  come  Jane,  don't  be  hard. 
She.  Well,  one  of  us   must   be  hard.      You're 
soft  enough. 

He.  Yes,  I  shouldn't  want  to  marry  you,  if  I 
weren't.  Ha!  ha!  ha! 

She.    Oh  you  gibbering  idiot  (said  archly). 


114  STAGE-LAND. 

He.  So  glad  I  am.  We  shall  make  a  capital 
match  (attempts  to  kiss  her  ). 

She  (slipping  away).  Yes,  and  you'll  find  I'm  a 
match  that  can  strike  (fetches  him  a  violent  blow 
over  the  side  of  the  head). 


THEY   BUMP   UP   AGAINST  EACH   OTHER. 


He  (holding  his  jaw — in  a  literal  sense,  we 
mean).  I  can't  help  feeling  smitten  by  her. 

She.  Yes,  I'm  a  bit  of  a  spanker,  aint  I  ? 

He.  Spanker!  /  call  you  a  regular  stunner. 
You've  nearly  made  me  silly. 


THE   COMIC  LOVERS.  1 15 

She  (laughing  playfully).  No,  nature  did  that 
for  you,  Joe,  long  ago. 

He.  Ah,  well,  you've  made  me  smart  enough 
now.  You  boss-eyed  old  cow,  you ! 

Site.  Cow !  am  I  ?  Ah,  I  suppose  that's  what 
makes  me  so  fond  of  a  calf!  You  German  sau- 
sage on  legs !  You — 

He.  Go  along.  Your  mother  brought  you  up 
on  sour  milk. 

She.  Yah !  They  weaned  you  on  thistles, 
didn't  they? 

And  so  on,  with  such  like  badinage  do  they 
hang  about  in  the  middle  of  that  road,  showering 
derision  and  contumely  upon  each  other  for  full 
ten  minutes,  when,  with  one  culminating  burst  of 
mutual  abuse,  they  go  off  together  fighting;  and 
the  street  is  left  once  more,  deserted. 

It  is  very  curious,  by-the-bye,  how  deserted  all 
public  places  become,  whenever  a  stage  character 
is  about.  It  would  seem  as  though  ordinary  citi- 
zens sought  to  avoid  them.  We  have  known  a 
couple  of  Stage  villains  to  have  Waterloo  Bridge, 
Lancaster  Place,  and  a  bit  of  the  Strand  entirely 
to  themselves,  for  nearly  a  quarter  of  an  hour  on 
a  summer's  afternoon,  while  they  plotted  a  most 
diabolical  outrage. 


n6 


STAGE-LAND. 


As  for  Trafalgar  Square,  the  hero  always  choses 
that  spot  when  he  wants  to  get  away  from  the 
busy  crowd  and  commune,  in  solitude,  with  his 
own  bitter  thoughts;  and  the  good  old  lawyer 
leaves  his  office,  and  goes  there  to  discuss  any 
very  delicate  business  over  which  he  particularly 
does  not  wish  to  be  disturbed. 

And  they  all  make  speeches  there  to  an  extent 


THEY  GO  OFF  TOGETHER  FIGHTING. 


sufficient  to  have  turned  the  hair  of  the  late 
lamented  Sir  Charles  Warren  white  with  horror. 
But  it  is  all  right,  because  there  is  nobody  near  to 
hear  them.  As  far  as  the  eye  can  reach,  not  a  living 
thing  is  to  be  seen.  Northumberland  Avenue, 
the  Strand,  and  St.  Martin's  Lane  are  simply  a 


THE   COMIC  LOVERS.  117 

wilderness.  The  only  sign  of  life  about  is  a  bus 
at  the  top  of  Whitehall,  and  it  appears  to  be 
blocked.  How  it  has  managed  to  get  blocked,  we 
cannot  say.  It  has  the  whole  road  to  itself;  and 
is,  in  fact,  itself  the  only  traffic  for  miles  round. 
Yet  there  it  sticks  for  hours.  The  police  make 
no  attempt  to  move  it  on,  and  the  passengers 
seem  quite  contented. 

The  Thames  Embankment  is  an  even  still  more 
lonesome  and  desolate  part.  Wounded  (stage) 
spirits  fly  from  the  haunts  of  men,  and,  leaving 
the  hard,  cold  world  far,  far  behind  them,  go  and 
die  in  peace  on  the  Thames  Embankment.  And 
other  wanderers,  finding  their  skeletons  after- 
wards, bury  them  there,  and  put  up  rude  crosses 
over  the  graves  to  mark  the  spot. 

The  comic  lovers  are  often  very  young;  and, 
when  people  on  the  stage  are  young,  they  are 
young.  He  is  supposed  to  be  about  sixteen,  and 
she  is  fifteen.  But  they  both  talk  as  if  they  were 
not  more  than  seven. 

In  real  life,  "boys"  of  sixteen  know  a  thing  or 
two,  we  have  generally  found.  The  average 
"boy"  of  sixteen,  nowadays,  usually  smokes 
cavendish,  and  does  a  little  on  the  Stock  Ex- 
change, or  makes  a  book:  and,  as  for  love!  he 


n8 


STAGE-LAND. 


has  quite  got  over  it  by  that  age.  On  the  stage, 
however,  the  new  born  babe  is  not  in  it  for  inno- 
cence with  the  boy  lover  of  sixteen. 

So,  too,  with  the  maiden.     Most  girls  of  fif- 
teen, off  the  stage,  so  our  experience  goes,  know 


THE  COMIC  LOVERS  ARE  OFTEN  VERY  YOUNG. 

as  much  as  there  is  any  actual  necessity  for  them 
to  know,  Mr.  Gilbert,  notwithstanding;  but  when 
we  see  a  young  lady  of  fifteen  on  the  stage,  we 
Avonder  where  her  cradle  is. 


THE   COMIC  LOVERS.  119 

The  comic  lovers  do  not  have  the  facilities  for 
love  making  that  the  hero  and  heroine  do.  The 
hero  and  heroine  have  big  rooms  to  make  love  in, 
with  a  fire  and  plenty  of  easy  chairs,  so  that  they 
can  sit  about  in  picturesque  attitudes,  and  do  it 
comfortably.  Or  if  they  want  to  do  it  out  of 
doors,  they  have  a  ruined  abbey,  with  a  big  stone 
seat  in  the  center,  and  moonlight. 

The  comic  lovers,  on  the  other  hand,  have  to 
do  it,  standing  up  all  the  time,  in  busy  streets,  or 
in  cheerless-looking  and  curiously  narrow  rooms, 
in  which  there  is  no  furniture  whatever,  and  no 
fire. 

And  there  is  always  a  tremendous  row,  going 
on  in  the  house,  when  the  comic  lovers  are  mak- 
ing love.  Somebody  always  seems  to  be  putting 
up  pictures  in  the  next  room,  and  putting  them 
up  boisterously,  too ;  so  that  the  comic  lovers 
have  to  shout  at  each  other. 


peasants. 


ARE  so  clean.  We 
have  seen  peasan- 
try off  the  stage, 
and  it  has  present- 
ed an  untidy — oc- 
casionally a  dis- 
reputable and  un- 
washed appearance ;  but  the  Stage  peasant  seems 
to  spend  all  his  wages  on  soap  and  hair  oil. 

They  are  always  round  the  corner — or  rather 
round  the  two  corners — and  they  come  on  in  a 
couple  of  streams,  and  meet  in  the  center;  and, 
when  they  are  in  their  proper  position,  they  smile. 
There  is  nothing  like  the  Stage  peasant's  smile 
in  this  world — nothing  so  perfectly  inane,  so 
calmly  imbecile. 

They  are  so  happy.     They  don't  look  it,  but 
we  know  they  are,  because  they  say  so.     If  you 
don't  believe  them,  they  dance  three  steps  to  the 
123 


124 


STAGE-LAND. 


right  and  three  steps  to  the  left  back  again.     They 
can't  help  it.     It  is  because  they  are  so  happy. 

When  they  are  more  than  usually  rollicking, 
they  stand  in  a  semi-circle,  with  their  hands  on 
each  other's  shoulders,  and  sway  from  side  to  side, 
trying  to  make  themselves  sick.  But  this  is  only 
when  they  are  simply  burst- 
ing with  joy. 

Stage  peasants  never  have 
any  work  to  do.  Sometimes 
we  see  them  going  to  work, 
sometimes  coming  home 
from  work,  but  nobody  has 
ever  seen  them  actually  at 
work.  They  could  not  af- 
ford to  work,  it  would  spoil 
their  clothes. 

They  are  very  sympathetic, 
are  Stage  peasants.  They 
never  seem  to  have  any 
affairs  of  their  own  to  think 
about,  but  they  make  up  for 
this  by  taking  a  three  hundred  horsepower  interest 
in  things  in  which  they  have  no  earthly  concern. 

What  particularly  rouses  them  is  the  heroine's 
love  affairs.     They  could  listen  to  that  all  day. 


SO   CAMLV  IMBECILE. 


THE  PEASANTS.  125 

They  yearn  to  hear  what  she  said  to  him,  and 
to  be  told  what  he  replied  to  her,  and  they  repeat 
it  to  each  other. 

In  our  own  love-sick  days,  we  often  used  to  go 
and  relate  to  various  people  all  the  touching  con- 
versations that  took  place  between  our  lady-love 
and  ourselves ;  but  our  friends  never  seemed  to 
get  excited  over  it.  On  the  contrary,  a  casual 
observer  might  even  have  been  led  to  the  idea 
that  they  were  bored  by  our  recital.  And  they 
had  trains  to  catch,  and  men  to  meet,  before  we 
had  got  a  quarter  through  the  job. 

Ah,  how  often,  in  those  days,  have  we  yearned 
for  the  sympathy  of  a  Stage  peasantry,  who 
would  have  crowded  round  us,  eager  not  to  miss 
one  word  of  the  thrilling  narrative;  who  would 
have  rejoiced  with  us  with  an  encouraging  laugh, 
and  have  condoled  with  us  with  a  grieved  "Oh," 
and  who  would  have  gone  off,  when  we  had  had 
enough  of  them,  singing  about  it. 

By  the  way,  this  is  very  beautiful  trait  in  the 
character  of  the  Stage  peasantry,  their  prompt 
and  unquestioning  compliance  with  the  slightest 
wish  of  any  of  the  principals. 

"Leave  me,  friends,"  says  the  heroine,  begin- 
ning to  make  preparations  for  weeping,  and,  before 


126  STAGE-LAND. 

she  can  turn  round,  they  are  clean  gone — one  lot 
to  the  right,  evidently  making  for  the  back  en- 
trance of  the  public  house,  and  the  other  half  to 
the  left,  where  they  visibly  hide  themselves  behind 
the  pump,  and  wait  till  somebody  else  wants 
them. 

The  Stage  peasantry  do  not  talk  much,  their 
strong  point  being  to  listen.  When  they  cannot 
get  any  more  information  about  the  state  of  the 
heroine's  heart,  they  like  to  be  told  long  and  com- 
plicated stories  about  wrongs  done  years  ago  to 
people  that  they  never  heard  of.  They  seem  to 
be  able  to  grasp  and  understand  these  stories  with 
ease.  This  makes  the  audience  envious  of  them. 

When  the  Stage  peasantry  do  talk,  however, 
they  soon  make  up  for  lost  time.  They  start  off 
all  together  with  a  suddenness  that  nearly  knocks 
you  over. 

They  all  talk.  Nobody  listens.  Watch  any 
two  of  them.  They  are  both  talking  as  hard  as 
they  can  go.  They  have  been  listening  quite 
enough  to  other  people:  you  can't  expect  them 
to  listen  to  each  other.  But  the  conversation, 
under  such  conditions,  must  be  very  trying. 

And  then  they  flirt  so  sweetly !  so  idyllicly ! 

It  has  been  our  privilege  to  see  real  peasantry 


THE  PEASANTS. 


127 


flirt,  and  it  has  always  struck  us  as  a  singularly 
solid  and  substantial  affair — makes  one  think, 
somehow,  of  a  steam  roller  flirting  with  a  cow — 
but  on  the  stage  it  is  so  sylph-like.  She  has  short 
skirts,  and  her  stockings  are  so  much  tidier  and 


SHE   IS  ARCH    AND   COY. 


better  fitting  than  these  things  are  in  real  peas- 
ant life ;  and  she  is  arch  and  coy.  She  turns  away 
from  him  and  laughs — such  a  silvery  laugh. 

And  he  is  ruddy  and  curly  haired,  and  has  on 


128  STAGE-LAND. 

such  a  beautiful  waistcoat !  how  can  she  help  but 
love  him?  And  he  is  so  tender  and  devoted,  and 
holds  her  by  the  waist;  and  she  slips  round  and 
comes  up  the  other  side.  Oh,  it  is  so  bewitching. 

The  Stage  peasantry  like  to  do  their  love-mak- 
ing as  much  in  public  as  possible.  Some  people 
fancy  a  place  all  to  themselves  for  this  sort  of 
thing — where  nobody  else  is  about.  We  ourselves 
do.  But  the  Stage  peasant  is  more  sociably  in- 
clined. Give  him  the  village  green,  just  outside 
the  public  house,  or  the  square,  on  market  day,  to 
do  his  spooning  in. 

They  are  very  faithful,  are  Stage  peasants.  No 
jilting,  no  fickleness,  no  breach  of  promise.  If 
the  gentleman  in  pink  walks  out  with  the  lady  in 
blue  in  the  first  act,  pink  and  blue  will  be  married 
in  the  end.  He  sticks  to  her  all  through,  and  she 
sticks  to  him. 

Girls  in  yellow  may  come  and  go  ;  girls  in  green 
may  laugh  and  dance;  the  gentleman  in  pink 
heeds  them  not.  Blue  is  his  color,  and  he  never 
leaves  it.  He  stands  beside  it,  he  sits  beside  it. 
He  drinks  with  her,  he  smiles  with  her,  he  laughs 
with  her,  he  dances  with  her,  he  comes  on  with 
her,  he  goes  off  with  her. 

When  the  time  comes  for  talking,  he  talks  to 


THE  PEASANTS.  129 

her  and  only  her;  and  she  talks  to  him  and  only 
him.  Thus  there  is  no  jealousy,  no  quarreling. 

But  we  should  prefer  an  occasional  change  our- 
selves. 

There  are  no  married  people  in  Stage  villages, 
and  no  children  (consequently,  of  course — happy 
village,  oh,  to  discover  it,  and  spend  a  month 
there!)  There  are  just  the  same  number  of  men 
as  there  are  women  in  all  Stage  villages,  and  they 
are  all  about  the  same  age  and  each  young  man 
loves  some  young  woman.  But  they  never  marry. 

They  talk  a  lot  about  it,  but  they  never  do  it. 
The  artful  beggars !  They  see  too  much  what  it's 
like  among  the  principals. 

The  Stage  peasant  is  fond  of  drinking,  and, 
when  he  drinks,  he  likes  to  let  you  know  he  is 
drinking.  None  of  your  quiet  half-pint  inside,  the 
bar  for  him.  He  likes  to  come  out  in  the  street 
and  sing  about  it,  and  do  tricks  with  it,  such  as 
turning  it  topsy-turvey  over  his  head. 

But,  notwithstanding  all  this,  he  is  moderate, 
mind  you.  You  can't  say  he  takes  too  much. 
One  small  jug  of  ale  among  forty  is  his  usual 
allowance. 

He  has  a  keen  sense  of  humor,  and  is  easily 
amused.  There  is  something  almost  pathetic 


130 


STAGE-LAND. 


about  the  way  he  goes  into  convulsions  of  laugh- 
ter over  such  very  small  jokes.  How  a  man  like 
that  would  enjoy  a  real  joke!  One  day  he  will, 
perhaps,  hear  a  real  joke.  Who  knows? 


HE   LIKES  TO   COME   OUT  INTO   THE  STREET  AND   SING  ABOUT  IT. 

It  will,  however,  probably  kill  him. 

One  grows  to  love  the  Stage  peasant  after 
awhile.  He  is  so  good,  so  childlike,  so  un- 
worldly. He  realizes  ones  ideal  of  Christianity. 


(Boob  <S>K> 


HAS  lost  his  wife.  But  he 
knows  where  she  is  — 
among  the  angels  ! 

She  isn't   all  gone,  be- 
cause the  heroine  has  her 
hair.      "Ah,   you've  got    your 
mother's  hair,"  says  the  good  old 
man,    feeling  the  girl's  head  all 
over,  as   she  kneels  beside  him. 
Then  they  all  wipe  away  a  tear. 

The  people  on  the  stage  think 
very  highly  of  the  good  old  man,  but  they  don't 
encourage  him  much,  after  the  first  act.  He 
generally  dies  in  the  first  act. 

If  he  does  not  seem  likely  to  die,  they  murder 
him. 

He  is  a  most  unfortunate  old  gentleman.     Any- 
thing he  is  mixed  up  in  seems  bound  to  go  wrong. 
If  he  is  manager  or  director  of  a  bank,  smash  it 
133 


134 


STAGE-LAND. 


goes  before  even  one  act  is  over.  His  particular 
firm  is  always  on  the  verge  of  bankruptcy.  We 
have  only  to  be  told  that  he  has  put  all  his  sav- 
ings into  a  company — no  matter  how  sound  and 
promising  an  affair  it  may  always  have  been,  and 


IF   HE   DOES  NOT  SEEM    LIKELY  TO   DIE,   THEY  MURDER   HIM. 

may  still  seem — to  know  that  that  company  is  a 
"gone-er." 

No  power  on  earth  can  save  it,  after  once  the 
good  old  man  has  become  a  shareholder. 

If  we  lived  in  Stage-land,  and  were  asked  to  join 
any  financial  scheme,  our  first  question  would  be; 


THE   GOOD   OLD  MAN.  135 

"Is  the  good  old  man  in  it?"  If  so,  that  would 
decide  us. 

When  the  good  old  man  is  a  trustee  for  anyone, 
he  can  battle  against  adversity  much  longer.  He 
is  a  plucky  old  fellow,  and,  while  that  trust  money 
lasts,  he  keeps  a  brave  heart,  and  fights  on  boldly. 
It  is  not  until  he  has  spent  the  last  penny  of  it, 
that  he  gives  way. 

It  then  flashes  across  the  old  man's  mind  that 
his  motives  for  having  lived  in  luxury  upon  that 
trust  money,  for  years,  may  possibly  be  misunder- 
stood. The  world — the  hollow,  heartless  world — 
will  call  it  a  swindle,  and  regard  him  generally  as 
a  precious  old  fraud. 

This  idea  quite  troubles  the  good  old  man. 

But  the  world  really  ought  not  to  blame  him. 
No  one,  we  are  sure,  could  be  more  ready  and 
willing  to  make  amends  (when  found  out) ;  and, 
to  put  matters  right,  he  will  cheerfully  sacrifice 
his  daughter's  happiness,  and  marry  her  to  the 
villain. 

The  villain,  by  the  way,  has  never  a  penny  to 
bless  himself  with,  and  cannot  even  pay  his  own 
debts,  let  alone  helping  anybody  else  out  of  a 
scrape.  But  the  good  old  man  does  not  think  of 
this, 


I36  STAGE-LAND. 

Our  own  personal  theory,  based  upon  a  careful 
comparison  of  similarities,  is  that  the  good  old 
man  is  in  reality  the  Stage  hero,  grown  old. 
There  is  something  about  the  good  old  man's 
chuckle-headed  simplicity,  about  his  helpless 
imbecility,  and  his  irritating  damtom  foolishness, 
that  is  strangely  suggestive  of  the  hero. 

He  is  just  the  sort  of  old  man  that  we  should 
imagine  the  hero  would  develop  into. 

We  may,  of  course,  be  wrong ;  but  that  is  our 
idea. 


Irish 


-man  . 


Cbe  flriebmait 


SAYS :  "Shure,"  and 
"Bedad,"  and,  in 
moments  of  exult- 
ation, "Beghorra." 
That  is  all  the  Irish 
he  knows. 

He  is  very  poor, 
but        scrupulously 
honest.      His   great 
ambition  is  to   pay 
his   rent,  and  he  is  de- 
>;_,  voted  to  his  landlord. 

He  is  always  cheerful,  and  always  good.  We 
never  knew  a  bad  Irishman,  on  the  stage.  Some- 
times a  Stage  Irishman  seems  to  be  a  bad  man — 
such  as  the  "agent,"  or  the  "informer" — but,  in 
these  cases,  it  invariably  turns  out,  in  the  end, 
that  this  man  was  all  along  a  Scotchman,  and 
thus  what  had  been  a  mystery  becomes  clear  and 
explicable. 

139 


140  STAGE-LAND. 

The  Stage  Irishman  is  always  doing  the  most 
wonderful  things  imaginable.  We  do  not  see  him 
do  these  wonderful  things.  He  does  them  when 
nobody  is  by,  and  tells  us  all  about  them  after- 
wards :  that  is  how  we  know  of  them. 

We  remember,  on  one  occasion,  when  we  were 
young  and  somewhat  inexperienced,  planking  our 
money  down,  and  going  into  a  theater  solely  and 
purposely  to  see  the  Stage  Irishman  do  the  things 
he  was  depicted  as  doing  on  the  posters  outside. 

They  were  really  marvelous,  the  things  he  did 
on  that  poster. 

In  the  right  hand  upper  corner,  he  appeared, 
running  across  country  on  all  fours,  with  a  red 
herring  sticking  out  from  his  coat  tails,  while,  far 
behind,  came  hounds  and  horsemen,  hunting  him. 
But  their  chance  of  ever  catching  him  was  clearly 
hopeless. 

To  the  left,  he  was  represented  as  running  away 
over  one  of  the  wildest  and  most  rugged  bits  of 
landscape  we  have  ever  seen,  with  a  very  big  man 
on  his  back.  Six  policemen  stood  scattered  about 
a  mile  behind  him.  They  had  evidently  been  run- 
ning after  him,  but  had,  at  last,  given  up  the  pur- 
suit as  useless. 

In  the  center  of  the  poster,  he  was  having  a 


THE  IRISHMAN.  141 

friendly  fight  with  seventeen  other  ladies  and 
gentlemen.  Judging  from  the  costumes,  the  affair 
appeared  to  be  a  wedding.  A  few  of  the  guests 
have  already  been  killed,  and  lay  dead  about  the 
floor.  The  survivors,  however,  were  enjoying 
themselves  immensely,  and  of  all  that  gay  group, 
he  was  the  gayest. 

At  the  moment  chosen  by  the  artist,  he  had 
just  succeeded  in  cracking  the  bridegroom's  skull. 

"We  must  see  this,"  said  we  to  ourselves. 
"This  is  good."  And  we  had  a  bob's  worth. 

But  he  did  not  do  any  of  the  things  that  we 
have  mentioned,  after  all — at  least,  we  mean,  we 
did  not  see  him  do  any  of  them.  It  seems  he  did 
them  "off,"  and  then  came  on  and  told  his  mother 
all  about  it  afterwards. 

He  told  it  very  well,  but,  somehow  or  other, 
we  were  disappointed.  We  had  so  reckoned  on 
that  fight. 

(By-the-bye,  we  have  noticed,  even  among  the 
characters  of  real  life,  a  tendency  to  perform  most 
of  their  wonderful  feats  "off.") 

It  has  been  our  privilege,  since  then,  to  gaze 
upon  many  posters,  on  which  have  been  deline- 
ated strange  and  moving  stage  events. 

We  have  seen  the  hero,  holding  the  villain  up 


142  STAGE-LAND. 

high  above  his  head,  and  throwing  him  about  that 
carelessly  that  we  have  felt  afraid  he  would  break 
something  with  him. 

We  have  seen  a  heroine,  leaping  from  the  roof 
of  a  house  on  one  side  of  the  street,  and  being 
caught  by  the  comic  man,  standing  on  the  roof  of 
a  house  the  other  side  of  the  street,  and  thinking 
nothing  of  it. 

We  have  seen  railway  trains  rushing  into  each 
other  at  the  rate  of  sixty  miles  an  hour.  We  have 
seen  houses  blown  up  by  dynamite  two  hundred 
feet  into  the  air.  We  have  seen  the  defeat  of  the 
Spanish  Armada,  the  destruction  of  Pompeii,  and 
the  return  of  the  British  Army  from  Egypt  in  one 
"set"  each. 

Such  incidents  as  earthquakes,  wrecks  in  mid- 
ocean,  revolutions  and  battles,  we  take  no  note 
of;  they  being  commonplace  and  ordinary. 

But  we  do  not  go  inside  to  see  these  things 
now.  We  have  two  looks  at  the  poster,  instead ; 
it  is  more  satisfying. 

The  Irishman,  to  return  to  our  friend,  is  very 
fond  of  whisky — the  Stage  Irishman  we  mean. 
Whisky  is  for  ever  in  his  thoughts — and  often  in 
other  places  belonging  to  him  besides.  It  is  cur- 
rently reported  that  it  was  the  child  of  a  Stage 


E;  /\  T         b"  R  /\  /^\  A 


J  UST  ICE 


THROWING   HIM   ABOUT  THAT  CARELESSLY. 


143 


144  STAGE-LAND. 

Irishman  who,  after  listening  to  an  eloquent  ser- 
mon on  the  text :  "Wist  ye  not  I  must  be  about 
my  Father's  business!"  reported  at  home  that  the 
preacher  had  been  telling  them  about  a  man  who 
always  called  for  "Whisky  hot !"  whenever  he 
went  about  any  business  for  his  father. 

The  fashion  in  dress  among  Stage  Irishmen  is 
rather  picturesque  than  neat.  Tailors  must  have 
a  hard  time  of  it  in  Stage  Ireland. 

The  Stage  Irishman  has  also  an  original  taste 
in  hats.  He  always  wears  a  hat  without  a  crown ; 
whether  to  keep  his  head  cool,  or  with  any  politi- 
cal significance,  we  cannot  say. 


Ti,, 


Detective. 


Hbe  Detective. 

HE  is  a  'cute  one  he  is. 

Possibly  in  real  life  he 
would    not    be    deemed 
anything    extraordinary ; 
but  by  contrast  with  the 
average    of    Stage     men    and 
women  any  one  who  is  not  a 
born  fool  naturally  appears  some- 
what Machiavelian. 

He  is  the  only  man,  in  the  play,  who  does  not 
swallow  all  the  villain  tells  him  and  believe  it,  and 
come  up  with  his  mouth  open  for  more.  He  is 
the  only  man  who  can  see  through  the  disguise  of 
an  overcoat  and  a  new  hat. 

There  is  something  very  wonderful  about  the 
disguising  power  of  cloaks  and  hats  upon  the  stage. 
This  comes  from  the  habit  people  on  the  stage 
have  of  recognizing  their  friends,  not  by  their  faces 
and  voices,  but  by  their  cloaks  and  hats. 

A  married  man,  on  the  stage,  knows  his  wife  be- 
147 


148 


STAGE-LAND. 


cause  he  knows  she  wears  a  blue  ulster  and  a  red 
bonnet.  The  moment  she  leaves  off  that  blue 
ulster  and  red  bonnet,  he  is  lost,  and  does  not 
know  where  she  is. 

She  puts  on  a  yellow  cloak  and  a  green  hat,  and, 


HE   IS  THE  ONLY   MAN   IN  THE    PLAY  WHO   CAN   SEE   THROUGH   THE 
DISGUISE   OF   AN   OVERCOAT  AND   A  NEW    HAT. 

coming  in  at  another  door,  says  she  is  a  lady  from 
the  country,  and  does  he  want  a  housekeeper? 

Having  lost  his  beloved  wife,  and,  feeling  that 
there  is  no  one  now  to  keep  the  children  quiet,  he 
engages  her.  She  puzzles  him  a  good,  deal  this 


THE  DETECTIVE.  149 

new  housekeeper.  There  is  something  about  her 
that  strangely  reminds  him  of  his  darling  Nell, 
may  be,  her  boots  and  dress,  which  she  has  not 
had  time  to  change. 

Sadly  the  slow  acts  pass  away  until  one  day, 
as  it  is  getting  near  closing  time,  she  puts  on  the 
blue  ulster  and  the  red  bonnet  again,  and  comes 
in  at  the  old,  original  door. 

Then  he  recognizes  her,  and  asks  her  where  she 
has  been  all  these  cruel  years ! 

Even  the  bad  people,  who,  as  a  rule,  do  possess 
a  little  sense — indeed,  they  are  the  only  persons, 
in  the  play,  who  ever  pretend  to  any — are  de- 
ceived by  singularly  thin  disguises. 

The  detective  comes  in  to  their  secret  councils, 
with  his  hat  drawn  down  over  his  eyes,  and,  fol- 
lowed by  the  hero,  speaking  in  a  squeaky  voice ; 
and  the  villains  mistake  them  for  members  of  the 
band,  and  tell  them  all  their  plans. 

If  the  villains  can't  get  themselves  found  out 
that  way,  then  they  go  into  a  public  tea-garden, 
and  recount  their  crimes  to  one  another  in  a  loud 
tone  of  voice. 

They  evidently  think  that  it  is  only  fair  to  give 
the  detective  a  chance. 

The  detective  must  not  be  confounded  with  the 


'50 


STAGE-LAND, 


policeman.  The  Stage  policeman  is  always  on 
the  side  of  the  villain ;  the  detective  backs  virtue. 
The  Stage  detective  is,  in  fact,  the  earthly  agent 
of  a  discerning  and  benevolent  Providence.  He 
stands  by,  and  allows  vice  to  be  triumphant  and 
the  good  people  to  be  persecuted,  for  a  while, 
without  interference.  Then  when  he  considers 


RECOUNT  THEIR  CRIMES  TO   ONE   ANOTHER   IN    A    LOUD   TONE   OF  VOICE. 

that  we  have  all  had  about  enough  of  it  (to  which 
conclusion,  by-the-bye,  he  arrives  somewhat  late), 
he  comes  forward,  handcuffs  the  bad  people,  sorts 
out  and  gives  back  to  the  good  people  all  their 
various  estates  and  wives,  promises  the  chief  vil- 
lain twenty  years  penal  servitude,  and  all  is  joy. 


>Stage  oailor- 


Sailor, 


DOES  suffer  so  with  his  trous- 
ers. He  has  to  stop  and  pull 
them  up  about  every  minute. 
One  of  these  days,  if  he 
is  not  careful,  there  will  be 
an  accident  happen  to  those 
trousers. 

If  the  Stage  sailor  will 
follow  our  advice,  he  will  be 
warned  in  time,  and  will  get 
a  pair  of  braces. 

Sailors,  in  real  life,  do  not 
have  nearly  so  much  trouble 
with  their  trousers  as  sailors  on  the  stage  do. 
Why  is  this  ?  We  have  seen  a  good  deal  of  sail- 
ors in  real  life,  but,  on  only  one  occasion,  that 
we  can  remember,  did  we  ever  see  a  real  sailor 
pull  his  trousers  up. 

And  then  he  did  not  do  it  a  bit  like  they  do  on 
the  stage. 


154  STAGE-LAND. 

The  Stage  sailor  places  his  right  hand  behind 
him  and  his  left  in  front,  leaps  up  into  the  air, 
kicks  out  his  legs  behind  in  a  gay  and  bird-like 
way,  and  the  thing  is  done. 

The  real  sailor  that  we  saw,  began  by  saying  a 
bad  word.  Then  he  leaned  up  against  a  brick 
wall  and  undid  his  belt,  pulled  up  his  "  bags,"  as 
he  stood  there,  (he  never  attempted  to  leap  up 
into  the  air,)  tucked  in  his  jersey,  shook  his  legs, 
and  walked  on. 

It  was  a  most  unpicturesque  performance  to 
watch. 

The  thing  that  the  Stage  sailor  most  craves  in 
this  life  is  that  somebody  should  shiver  his  tim- 
bers. 

"  Shiver  my  timbers  !  "  is  the  request  he  makes 
to  every  one  he  meets.  But  nobody  ever  does  it. 

His  chief  desire  with  regard  to  the  other  people 
in  the  play  is  that  they  should  "  belay  there, 
avast !  "  We  do  not  know  how  this  is  done  ;  but 
the  Stage  sailor  is  a  good  and  kindly  man,  and 
we  feel  convinced  he  would  not  recommend  the 
exercise  if  it  were  not  conducive  to  piety  and 
health. 

The  Stage  sailor  is  good  to  his  mother,  and 
dances  the  hornpipe  beautifully.  We  have  never 


THE   SAILOR. 


'55 


found  a  real  sailor  who  could  dance  a  hornpipe, 
though  we  have  made  extensive  inquiries  through- 
out the  profession.  We  were  introduced  to  a 
ship's  steward,  who  offered  to  do  us  a  cellar-flap 


DANCES  THE   HORNPIPE   BEAUTIFULLY. 


for  a  pot  of  four-half ;  but  that  was  not  what  we 
wanted. 

The  Stage  sailor  is  gay  and  rollicking;  the  real 
sailors,  we  have  met,  have  been,  some  of  them, 


15  6  STAGE-LAND. 

the  most  worthy  and  single-minded  of  men,  but 
they  have  appeared  sedate  rather  than  gay,  and 
they  hav'n't  rollicked  much. 

The  Stage  sailor  seems  to  have  an  easy  time  of 
it,  when  at  sea.  The  hardest  work  we  have  ever 
seen  him  do  then  has  been  folding  up  a  rope  or 
dusting  the  sides  of  the  ship. 

But  it  is  only  in  his  very  busy  moments  that 
he  has  to  work  to  this  extent ;  most  of  his  time 
is  occupied  in  chatting  with  the  captain. 

By  the  way,  speaking  of  the  sea,  few  things  are 
more  remarkable  in  their  behavior  than  a  Stage 
sea.  It  must  be  difficult  to  navigate  in  a  Stage 
sea,  the  currents  are  so  confusing. 

As  for  the  waves,  there  is  no  knowing  how  to 
steer  for  them  ;  they  are  so  tricky.  At  one  mo- 
ment they  are  all  on  the  larboard,  the  sea  on  the 
other  side  of  the  vessel  being  perfectly  calm,  and, 
the  next  instant,  they  have  crossed  over,  and  are 
all  on  the  starboard,  and,  before  the  captain  can 
think  how  to  meet  this  new  dodge,  the  whole 
ocean  has  slid  round  and  got  itself  up  into  a  heap 
at  the  back  of  him. 

Seamanship  is  useless  against  such  very  unpro- 
fessional conduct  as  this,  and  the  vessel  is  wrecked. 

A  wreck  at  (Stage)  sea  is  a  truly  awful  sight. 


THE   SAILOR.  157 

The  thunder  and  lightning  never  leave  off  for  an 
instant;  the  crew  run  round  and  round  the  mast 
and  scream  ;  the  heroine,  carrying  the  Stage  child 
in  her  arms,  and  with  her  back  hair  down,  rushes 
about  and  gets  in  everybody's  way.  The  comic 
man  alone  is  calm  ! 

The  next  instant,  the  bulwarks  fall  down  flat 
on  the  deck,  and  the  mast  goes  straight  up  into 
the  sky  and  disappears  ;  then,  the  water  reaches 
the  powder  magazine,  and  there  is  a  terrific  ex- 
plosion. 

This  is  followed  by  a  sound  as  of  linen  sheets 
being  ripped  up,  and  the  passengers  and  crew 
hurry  downstairs  into  the  cabin,  evidently  with 
the  idea  of  getting  out  of  the  way  of  the  sea, 
which  has  climbed  up,  and  is  now  level  with  the 
deck. 

The  next  moment,  the  vessel  separates  in  the 
middle,  and  goes  off  R.  and  L.,  so  as  to  make 
room  for  a  small  boat  containing  the  heroine,  the 
the  child,  the  comic  man,  and  one  sailor. 

The  way  small  boats  are  managed  at  (Stage) 
sea  is  even  more  wonderful  than  the  way  in 
which  ships  are  sailed. 

To  begin  with,  everybody  sits  sideways  along 
the  middle  of  the  boat,  all  facing  the  starboard. 


158 


STAGE-LAND. 


They  do  not  attempt  to  row.  One  man  does  all 
the  work  with  one  scull.  This  scull  he  puts  down 
through  the  water  till  it  touches  the  bed  of  the 
ocean,  and  then  he  shoves. 

"  Deep  sea  punting  "  would  be  the  technical 
term  for  the  method,  we  presume. 

In  this  way  do  they  toil — or  rather,  to  speak 
correctly,  does  the  one  man  toil — through  the 
awful  night,  until  with  joy  they  see  before  them 
the  lighthouse  rocks. 

The  lighthouse  keeper  comes  out  with  a  lan- 
tern, the  boat  is  run  in  among  the  breakers,  and 
all  are  saved ! 

And  then  the  band  plays. 


DEEP   SEA   PUNTING. 


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